After three successful volumes of ‘Tragédiennes’, Véronique Gens follows in the great line of French-speaking sopranos by committing to disc the time-honoured coupling of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and Ravel’s Shéhérazade. Not so bright of timbre as Suzanne Danco, not so voluptuously rich in colours as Régine Crespin, she is a singer of the middle ground – warm, sensitive, the lyrical French soprano par excellence.

A link back to her three discs of French tragic arias is made at the start by including Berlioz’s early dramatic scena Herminie, a Classical heroine whom Gens brings to life as sympathetically as any of her operatic portrayals. Other performances may venture more dangerously close to the music’s nerve-endings but it is a joy to hear a native French speaker in the work. The same virtue also distinguishes the Berlioz and Ravel song-cycles. It is unusual to encounter a recording of Les nuits d’été in which the colouring is so consistent throughout – most rival solo interpreters try to vary the songs as much as they can, let alone the multi-voice recordings, like the early Colin Davis, Gardiner and Boulez – but Gens has in her sights a purer kind of poetry. How beautifully the ‘Spectre de la rose’ dances its ghostly waltz here, the flowing speed perfectly judged by John Axelrod to give the rhythms a lift and allow Gens to phrase the poem in unbroken sentences with total naturalness. A convincing argument is made for pacing the whole cycle swiftly. In Shéhérazade she is an engaging story-teller, though in this case the somewhat dull colours that Axelrod draws from Ravel’s exotic orchestration are more of a drawback. I shall not be setting aside Crespin’s classic recording (one of my personal desert island discs); but, on her own terms, Gens is completely satisfying.