French vocal music could not have a finer ambassador’ was how I closed my citation for our Artist of the Year, Véronique Gens, in last autumn’s Gramophone Awards. As if further proof were needed (it really wasn’t), along comes the soprano’s latest album for Alpha. Entitled ‘Paysage’, after Reynaldo Hahn’s song, it is a classy collection of French orchestral songs. And as it’s a co-production involving Palazzetto Bru Zane, those songs involve plenty of rediscoveries.

The two most famous groups of French orchestral songs – neither of them cycles in the strictest sense – are Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (1840 41, orch 1856) and Ravel’s Shéhérazade (1903). Neither of them appears on this disc but all the repertoire includes late Romantic works by composers as familiar as Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Chausson, Hahn and Fauré, but also Théodore Dubois, a little-remembered composer who, like Fauré, died a century ago this year.

The four accomplished songs by Dubois presented here were all orchestrated by the composer during his retirement. The two Chansons de Marjolie are especially affecting; ‘Celui que j’aime’ has an almost operatic sweep to it, while ‘En paradis’ features a sighing solo violin line.

Some of the songs will be familiar from their voice-and-piano guise: Hahn’s ‘D’une prison’ and ‘Paysage’, perhaps, and Fauré’s ‘Clair de lune’ and ‘Les roses d’Ispahan’, but nonetheless it’s a joy to hear them in their composer’s own orchestrations. And Chausson’s glowing setting of the elegiac ‘Les morts’ deserves to be better known, one of many gems on this disc. Gens is in quite splendid voice. Her soprano is in remarkably good shape, supple and elegant, her diction exemplary and her phrasing exquisite, deftly capturing the mood of each song.

She is ably supported by Hervé Niquet and the Munich Radio Orchestra, who get to bask in the spotlight in several orchestral interludes. Although there are no Massenet songs on the disc – Bru Zane lavished a single disc on him that Tim Ashley adored (9/22) – we do get the beautiful ‘Pastoral’ from Esclarmonde, ‘Solitude’ from Sapho, and ‘Invocation’ from Les Érinnyes, which will be familiar to British ballet-goers as it is used in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. Niquet shapes the Nocturne from Fauré’s Shylock tenderly and the Munich horn gleams in the lovely Rêverie by another neglected composer, Fernand de La Tombelle. Warmly recommended.