Schoenberg wasn’t wrong when he said (in 1925) that modern composers could only write introductions, ‘able only to place one thing next to another’. In his instrumental music, Poulenc chose to do this with panache, but the choral works are something else: masterful, all four ‘cycles’ on this disc, untainted by ironic expressions and embodying the sense of the text through form and harmony. Each of the four songs of Un soir de neige gets straight to the heart of the matter, which in this instance is a wintry journey of despair, more heavily flecked than the better-known Eluard cycle of the following year, Figure humaine, by modal, Parsifalian sequences of pathless wandering and unanticipated illumination.

The Swedish Radio Choir joins a very few professional ensembles – the most pre-eminent listed below – in being fully equal to the challenges of tuning and dynamic flexibility that larger ensembles and cathedral choirs must negotiate with inevitable losses in rhythmic freedom. Ribbons of joy fly brightly through the Gloria and Sanctus of the Mass from 1937; the two Apollinaire poems bookending the Sept chansons of 1936 dance with Janequin-like glee. Peter Dijkstra keeps the music moving and flowing, and only the penultimate fugue of Figure humaine feels rushed; the bitter scherzo of ‘Riant du ciel’ is pointed with astonishing brilliance. It’s in the following reflection, and similar slow movements, that I miss the fruitier voices and more intimately turned response of the native members of Accentus. Channel Classics places the Swedish choir nearer the microphones but the Naïve disc communicates to me most vividly what the cycle must have meant to its first listeners in bombed-out London and worn-out Paris.