For some reason, room was not found on these two discs for the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, otherwise this would have been the only complete set of Ravel songs on the market. As it is, the project as a whole is something of a curate’s egg from the performance point of view, with several superb renderings and one or two that really should have been sent back for cleaning.

Among the things I would not want to hear again are the Chanson francaise, where the tenor is badly out of tune, and sounds in early morning form, Si morne!, where the soprano’s top notes are squally, ‘Trois beaux oiseaux’ from the arrangement of the choral Trois chansons, where tuning again is a problem, and, I’m very sorry to say, the three Don Quichotte songs. Elsewhere generally slowish tempi often make phrasing difficult for the singers, but here the somewhat lugubrious speeds of the first two songs (timings of 2'22" and 3'23", as against the 2'02" and 2'57" of Martial Singher, who premièred the set in 1934) impede the music’s flow. Contrariwise, the last song, ‘Chanson à boire’, is faster than Singher’s, which in every case are close to Ravel’s metronome marks, so that one or two syllables are a touch scrambly. The piano sound in these songs is rather harsh and metallic, and I could have done without the extra low octave on the final note. Ravel was capable of writing octaves when he wanted them.

On a lower level of concern comes the slightly recessed sound of the piano throughout. There is no cause to be reticent about David Abramovitch’s playing, which in general is clean and sensitive, and virtuosic where called for (the guinea fowl’s screeches in Histoires naturelles are splendidly lifelike). But at times the accompaniments do lack presence. In the last Don Quichotte song, too, Laurent Naouri seems to have wandered slightly off-mike. One other curious feature is the incorrect ordering of the Trois chansons, where tracks 8 and 9 need to be transposed.

For me, two of the five singers stand some way above the rest. Naouri was an impressive Golaud in the recent Haitink Pelléas and he is a talented and thoughtful artist. Occasionally his tuning is less than perfect – one or two of the throwaway lines in Histoires naturelles are thrown rather carelessly for my taste – and the high passages in Sainte test him slightly. But the three Hebrew songs are extremely fine and moving. Best of all is the mezzo Claire Brua, whose Chansons madécasses are a real high point of the set, and worthy to be spoken of in the same breath as the classic Madeleine Grey performances made under Ravel’s supervision. She uses the words to great effect, expressing melancholy, reflection, surprise, eagerness, all through diction and phrasing. Not for the first or last time, a training in Baroque music pays dividends in this French repertoire. Recommending a whole two-disc set just for this performance would seem rather extravagant (the Naxos price bracket notwithstanding), but certainly this is not an interpretation any Ravel-lover would want to miss.