Anyone familiar with the repertoire on this disc will know that it has been reflected and refracted through many artistic lenses. Nevertheless, French singer-songwriter Marion Rampal manages to offer something different to anything I’ve heard before. Much of this derives from the unusual nature of her accompaniment, a mixture of string quartet and Raphaël Imbert’s raspy, bluesy sax and bass clarinet.

Rampal’s own delivery is free, underplaying gritty Weimar ese in favour of something one moment gently and wistfully Gallic, the next offering something almost wildly expressionistic – she does nothing to hide her accent, and chooses English or German apparently at random. Certainly the result fits in with her apparent aim, gleaned from Rampal’s own notes: to underline this music’s time and place while also setting it free from that context.

It won’t appeal to everyone, though, and the three musical elements often fit uneasily. Rampal’s easy vocalising doesn’t always blend with the suave, sophisticated Quatuor Manfred. Imbert’s own sax solos often spiral off into so much directionless footling – the performance of ‘I saw many friends’ surely goes too far down this route. The voiceless arrangement of Eisler’s ‘Solidaritätslied’ strangely seems to undermine the whole spirit of the song, too, though Imbert offers a haunting bass clarinet scene-setting at the start of Weill’s ‘Ballad of a Drowned Girl’.

The sandwiching of Arno Billing/Mischa Spoliansky’s proto-Pride ‘The Lavender Song’ inside Hindemith’s brilliantly bad arrangements of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman Overture (‘as sight-read by a bad resort band playing at the fountain at seven in the morning) is done, we’re told, ‘in the spirit of a Dadaist collage’. It’s just one moment on this album that left me scratching my head a little, though. Elsewhere, despite Rampal’s beguiling contributions, I almost wished we had more just of the Quatuor Manfred, who play their solo numbers and accompaniments exquisitely. A strange, often haunting album, then, but certainly not one for purists.