Diva summit meetings can crackle with competitive tension, but don’t lower-stakes duet albums – made among friends – merit more happy returns on recordings? This dual song recital by Katharina Konradi and Catriona Morison is something to cherish. One must look decades back to the 1992 ‘Duets’ by Elisabeth Söderström and Kerstin Meyer (BIS, 9/93) to find an album so charming, effortlessly musical and with such enterprising repertoire.

The album takes its title from the little‑known Maria Malibran song ‘Le prisonnier’, whose Joan-Pierre de Béranger text is about ‘Queen of the waves … singing long echoes … the waves are calm and clear’. But the starting point for this programme is Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel, Op 74, which shows the composer writing for multiple voices at his lyrical best. Brahms duets naturally follow, selected from Opp 20 and 61; then the 1883 Chausson duets Op 11 arrive not a moment too soon. The voices enjoy an expanded range and independence from each other, plus a rhapsodic manner that the more reserved Brahms didn’t allow himself in the context of domestic music-making.

These duets deliver many elements that Schumann and Brahms do not. The second Chausson duet gives more (and appreciated) solo time to Morison, while the piano-writing takes one up to Debussy’s doorstep – also giving the attentive pianist, Ammiel Bushakevitz, more sophisticated accompaniments to play. Increasingly rediscovered female composers including Malibran, Viardot and Mel Bonis make brief but very welcome appearances. Near the end, Konradi and Morison jam one’s musical radar with a series of songs you’d swear are by Falla and Granados but are actually Gounod and Fauré. Whoever thought that Gounod would write something as unbottoned as ‘La siesta’? Or that Fauré would ever write a true tarantella?

All of this music is readily findable on anthology sets, and often with highly charismatic performers. However, the hand-picked quality of this programme avoids what one might call anthology-itis, a professionalism-over-inspiration quality that’s felt even in the three-disc Brahms ‘Complete Duets & Quartets’ with an ensemble headed by Juliane Banse (CPO, 6/17). In purely vocal terms, Konradi and Morison (friends since their student years) mesh beautifully, which one especially appreciates after hearing Edith Mathis and Brigitte Fassbaender in their oddly matched Spanisches Liederspiel live from Salzburg in 1974 (Orfeo). But the fact that Konradi and Morison’s sense of cohesion grows less tidy in the later, sexier selections is actually endearing, reminding you that this music is attractive because it’s not good, clean fun.