The name has been around, steadily winning recognition and approval over the past few years, even with a rumour accruing: Degout may be the Panzéra de nos jours, possibly the Souzay, at least the le Roux. This is his first solo recital known to me and it is of that elusive nature peculiar to French song – one thinks to have caught the singer clearly in a melodic line but it soon slips ever so slightly out of definition. Not, let’s add quickly, that there is anything infirm about his notes or verbal enunciation. But the character of the tone evades recapture, as does much of the music itself. I take in a short sequence of songs and find after a while that they have not taken me along with them. Is it the nature of the songs or the singing (or both?); but what (I find myself asking) have I have been hearing about?

So it may be well to pause and take stock after the first seven. The voice – a natural for Pelléas, one would think – responds rapturously to Debussy and Verlaine’s submarine wonders, then echoes the anguished tenderness of the woodland horn, the hedgerows where nature pales beneath a milky sky (is that what they have been about?). Then in the Duparc group we revive memories of Charles Panzéra, baritone of the 1930s, and, yes, there is a likeness, a line even between these two singers. While characterised by a very French refinement – nothing too much, for instance – both can expand tone and emotion frankly, as in the third verse (“C’est là que j’ai vécu”) of “La vie antérieure”.

At this point the programme lightens somewhat: Saint-Säens, Chabrier and Hahn approaching the condition of popular song and the artists adapting themselves well. It is these songs and their comparisons that nevertheless come closer to defining a limitation. Both Stephen Varcoe and François le Roux in their recitals have Graham Johnson as pianist, and that helps. One further comparison remains to be made, inevitably with Gérard Souzay. In Ravel’s Histoires naturelles (recorded in 1951), the voice is so beautiful, the style so richly animated that his mastery is beyond question. The modern master is not quite there yet.