"Music by Fauré is not very familiar to American audiences. He is best known here by his songs and by the incidental music which he wrote for Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande"—music, by the way, which is far from showing him at his best. This quintet is in another case. [...] Fauré is reckoned, somewhat mistakenly, among those younger French music-makers who are conveniently summed up as "advanced." Actually, he is in his music infinitely less radical, less adventurous, in his methods of musical expression than are those younger men with whom he has been indiscriminately grouped. Yet in this new quintet there is much that is genuinely, and in the best sense, "modern" In its method of utterance: there are harmonic effects that are delicious in their subtlety and their iridescent hue; there are melodic ideas which captivate the imagination by their freedom and their delicacy of contour. More noteworthy, however, than the surface quality of this music that is unfailingly serene and noble, and that has moments of deep and exquisite beauty. In the second movement, particularly, there are pages where one is reminded that there is such a thing as "inspiration" even—shall one extravagantly say?—in contemporary music."