There’s been a surge of interest in French chamber songs of late, and Katherine Broderick’s new Champs Hill recital shares some of its material, inevitably perhaps, with both Marie-Nicole Lemieux’s ‘Chansons perpétuelles’ (Naïve, 6/15) and Karine Deshayes’s ‘Après un rêve’ (Aparté, 9/15). By not limiting herself to the fin de siècle repertory, however, Broderick is able to include Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, along with rarities by Caplet and Gaubert that her predecessors omit.

Broderick is well known on the operatic stage as Donna Anna and Brünnhilde, and her steely soprano and declamatory way with words serve her wonderfully well when it comes to Debussy and Ravel. She delivers ‘Aoua’ from the Chansons madécasses with blistering heft, and her no-frills way with the rest of the cycle makes it sexier and subtler than the suggestive approach favoured by some interpreters. The voice’s size really tells in Debussy’s Proses lyriques, meanwhile, which, as the booklet-notes point out, needs a bigger sound than usual in French song, though there are also some rapturous high pianissimos, beautifully taken. Elsewhere we could do with a bit more lyricism: Deshayes’s sense of line gives her the edge over Broderick in Berlioz; Chausson’s ‘Chanson perpétuelle’ is grandly tragic, though Lemieux’s mix of sensuality and introversion is preferable here.

James Baillieu is Broderick’s outstanding pianist, nowhere more so than in Chansons madécasses, where Ravel’s insidious ostinatos really creep under your skin. Adam Walker, the LSO’s principal flautist, is breathtaking in Saint-Saëns’s ‘Une flûte invisible’, while cellist Tim Lowe sounds poised and elegant throughout. The Heath Quartet don’t have as much to do as one would like, though leader Oliver Heath comes into his own in the big violin obbligato for Saint-Saëns’s ‘Violons du soir’. The recording itself makes Walker over-prominent but is otherwise as clear and spacious as one could wish.