In part a homage to the fin-de-siècle salon, this is a disc of mélodies with ensemble accompaniment, and as such has points in common with Marie Nicole Lemieux’s ‘Chansons perpétuelles’ album released earlier this year (Naïve, 6/15). Whereas Lemieux, however, restricted herself to original works, interspersed with German and Russian songs with solo piano, Karine Deshayes and Ensemble Contraste stick with the French repertoire, opting, in places, to use arrangements by the ensemble’s pianist Johan Farjot.

Late-19th-century salons, of course, delighted in small-scale versions or excerpts from larger works, and many of the works here existed in multiple arrangements and transcriptions well within their composers’ lifetimes, some – Massenet’s Elégie, for instance – adding a vocal line to a purely instrumental original. Placed beside such numbers as Chausson’s ‘La chanson perpétuelle’, for mezzo and piano quintet, or Berlioz’s ‘La captive’, with its cello obbligato, Farjot’s adaptations, mostly for piano trio, are judiciously idiomatic, the exception being Fauré’s ‘Après un rêve’ itself, which is prefaced by a rather saccharine string transcription of the song’s main melody.

It’s nicely done, for the most part. Deshayes has a light-ish mezzo with an appealing shimmer in her upper registers and warm chest tones, used sparingly, but to telling effect, in Saint-Saëns’s ‘Violons dans le soir’. Her diction isn’t great – there are more than a few dropped consonants – and no texts are provided, which places her at a further disadvantage. The playing is consistently beautiful, and the spattering of purely instrumental numbers really allows the Ensemble Contraste to shine. In the context, both the Méditation from Thaïs and Saint-Saëns’s ‘Le cygne’ emerge very much as songs without words. The latter, in particular, sounds wonderfully poised and eloquent as played by the ensemble’s outstanding cellist Antoine Pierlot.