Here’s a very grown-up pleasure: Benjamin Bernheim and Carrie-Ann Matheson have put together a recital of French-language songs that are not typically sung by tenors. And in the case of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, they’re not typically heard with piano, either, though Bernheim (in a thoughtful booklet interview) makes a strong case for both. Those undying high-romantic preoccupations – nature, the sea, the flowering and fading of l’amour – bind everything together, mapping a surprisingly convincing path from Berlioz to Jacques Brel.

But really, these performances speak eloquently for themselves. Bernheim is a singer of immense refinement and tonal lustre whose distinctively Gallic qualities (and since the album is entitled ‘Douce France’, we might as well acknowledge them) – a certain clarity of line, and the piquant, plangent flare of his voice on extended vowels – aid rather than impede some wonderfully subtle word-colouring. Listen to his little vocal slide in the opening lines of ‘Au cimetière’, or the controlled rapture with which he soars free, in big, aspiring lines, at the start of the Chausson.

You might, perhaps, ask for a little more passionate abandon in the opening section of the Poème but there’s no questioning the intelligence or commitment of Bernheim’s readings (his Duparc songs, in particular, are exquisite). Or the sensitive, endlessly responsive piano-playing from Matheson, who finds a distinctively pianistic palette of colour for the two orchestral cycles, and then slips so easily, so affectionately into the final trio of chansons that it’s hard to suppress a smile. Together, they work ‘Quand on n’a que l’amour’ up to a truly Brel-like pitch of wounded passion: an unexpectedly apt conclusion to the tale that this whole recital so beautifully unfolds.