There’s a lot of classy competition when it comes to recordings of Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne but happily this new BIS disc featuring soprano Carolyn Sampson will settle comfortably in their company. Canteloube composed – well, arranged, transcribed, harmonised – these songs from the Auvergne region into five series, and of the 30 songs published, 25 are performed here, with Pascal Rophé and the Tapiola Sinfonietta providing the colourful orchestral support. Indeed, the Finnish orchestra take to these French scores like canards to water, the woodwinds in particular revelling in the delicious improvisatory soliloquies that Canteloube uses to link some of the numbers, like a shepherd piping across the valley to a shepherdess, inviting her to take up the next solo.

Sampson’s soprano is bright and coquettish, more akin to the great Victoria de los Ángeles with the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux (essential listening) than, say, Véronique Gens in Lille (Naxos, two volumes). There is plenty of character and expression to her singing, notably in the Trois Bourrées, where Gens’s good humour can sound a tad forced. Sampson gets her tongue around the notoriously difficult-to-learn Auvergne dialect, derived from Occitan, nimbly. Each character is brought vividly to life, such as the farmer’s daughter who is sent to look after the cattle but goes for a roll in the hay with her lover instead. ‘There may be girls with better hairdos’, she sings, ‘but it is better to be kissed more.’ Well quite. This is feel-good music and Sampson makes us feel good listening to it.

She has a dreamy way with the slower numbers, such as ‘Pastourelle’ or the lullaby ‘Brezairola’, and her ‘Baïlèro’ is spun out in very leisurely fashion (although not as luxuriously slow as Frederica von Stade with the RPO). Sometimes one wishes for the warmer, duskier mezzo – von Stade is very special in her two discs devoted to these songs – but that’s just personal preference. This is as enjoyable a selection of Canteloube’s songs as you will currently find and admirers of this soprano – or this delightful music – need not hesitate.