These two performers won the Francis Poulenc Prize in the Paris International Song Competition in 1999. Among their many virtues are the singer’s ability to articulate Poulenc’s various tongue-twisters with splendid panache and the pianist’s likewise to get round the various finger-twisters. Mostly, the loud, fast songs are superbly done. But I have to ask myself why, having heard this disc twice, I really have no keen desire to hear it again. My answer is fourfold.

Firstly, there is no indication that they have read any of Pierre Bernac’s copious annotations on these songs. To take just one example, Bernac says that for ‘Sanglots’, the last song of the cycle Banalités, the printed metronome mark of crotchet=66 is too fast and should be reduced to crotchet=56. Pruvot and Bouisset start at the faster speed, but by the end of the song have relaxed into the slower tempo! Unfortunately this variation of speed does not help the song. Secondly, some of Poulenc’s more hectic speeds are wrongly reduced. In particular, by slowing the last of the Chansons villageoises, ‘Le retour du sergent’, from the requested ‘strictement crotchet=138’ to something nearer crotchet=120, they remove a lot of its bite.

The third thing I find disappointing is Pruvot’s rather narrow range of colour, allied to his reluctance really to ‘use’ the words. When a singer, as here, breathes twice in the sentence ‘Et le rêveur/allait pensant/à sa blessure’ (‘And the dreamer went his way thinking of his wound’ – with no rests in the vocal line), one is forced to wonder whether he is alive to the meaning of his text: the first breath is permissible, the second surely makes nonsense. At no point in the slower songs did I get the feeling that Pruvot was savouring the words, as Poulenc himself did – often for years before he was able to put notes on paper.

Finally, I am worried by Pruvot’s top register, which is often insecure below mezzo-forte, leading to some flatness. Also if he’s going to float high notes in head voice, this needs to be better integrated into his overall production. Writing as he so frequently was for Bernac, Poulenc does pose problems for orthodox baritones. I feel that Pruvot’s voice, with its bass-baritonal timbre, is never going to fit some of these songs easily, and even with the whole of Tel jour, telle nuit a tone down there are still uneasy moments (notably the high G on ‘prison’ at the end of the penultimate song). I wish I could warm to this disc, because so much of it is accurate and performed in the right spirit. As for the rest, finding help for the singer’s upper register and reading Bernac would go some way at least to meeting my concerns.