The Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (1873-1953), who lived most of his life in Liège, is primarily known for his large-scale organ works, such as the Sonata eroïca (1930) and Symphonie concertante for organ and orchestra (1926 27). Musique en Wallonie, however, has been re-examining his wider output of late, including music for piano and orchestra and for voice and chamber ensemble, and to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth has now released this two-disc set of his songs, continuing a complete survey begun in 2019.

The music itself is markedly uneven. Songs occupied Jongen on and off throughout his career, though his output tapered off after the First World War. He was prolific if derivative in his late teens and early 20s. Early works account for over half the music recorded here, and it is sometimes difficult to trace the emergence of Jongen’s individual voice amid all the imitations and borrowings. ‘Pâquerette’, his first song, at 17, has an elegant charm too reminiscent of Delibes. Many of its immediate successors have a certain cloying sweetness: the most imposing of them, the sanctimonious ‘Malheur à vous’, flagrantly swipes ‘Avant de quitter ces lieux’ from Gounod’s Faust for its main melody. Every so often, though, something really fires his imagination. ‘Les berceuses’, one of his Sully Prudhomme settings, hits home in its sad depiction of sailors’ wives separated from their husbands, while ‘Barcarolle vénitienne’, to a text by his brother Alphonse, inveighs against the transitoriness of existence with barbed irony.

A similar attraction to dark subject matter notably informs the later, greater works that are the set’s raison d’être: the Op 29 cycle from 1906 and Les fêtes rouges, a further cycle written during the First World War. Op 29 chronicles the collapse of a love affair but startlingly does so in reverse, opening with chromatic anguish and bitter recrimination before winding backwards through mockery, yearning and sensuality to wistful memories of first meetings in the deceptively simple closing song. Les fêtes rouges is a savage anti-war work, shot through with subverted religious symbolism, in which the Magi depart from a denuded landscape after a despoiled Nativity, death holds a carnival in the trenches and the 12 Apostles return among mankind ‘to teach justified hatred’.

Even here, Jongen wears his influences on his sleeve. Op 29, with its weighty piano-writing and sweeping vocal lines, explicitly summons Duparc. Les fêtes rouges owes much to Debussy, though the disquieting image of a swan trapped in ice also allows Jongen to echo the unresolved dissonances and arpeggios of ‘Die Stadt’ from Schubert’s Schwanengesang. Les fêtes rouges contains some truly remarkable music, not least the ferocious perpetuum mobile that depicts trench warfare, though both cycles ultimately deserve wider attention than they have hitherto received.

This is challenging repertory for a single singer, though Defrise handles it all with considerable aplomb. Her sound is clear and bright, with a hint of metal in the tone and an operatic blaze at the top, which really impresses in the song-cycles, where restraint would be fatal. Words are carefully projected without fracturing lines. Op 29 is notably intense; Les fêtes rouges seems fractionally more detached, as if sometimes numbed by the horrors it describes. Elsewhere, though, there’s room for delicacy, and songs such as the saccharine ‘Le souhait de la violette’ are done with considerable charm. Though the recording itself sometimes places the piano fractionally too far back, White is a fine accompanist, warm in tone and admirably dexterous over a wide stylistic range that veers from drastic simplicity to virtuoso extremes. The accompanying booklet includes scholarly notes by Defrise herself, who is also the author of a doctorate on Jongen’s work. Fascinating, all of it.