Popular in her lifetime, then ignored for decades, Cécile Chaminade’s mélodies have edged their way back into the repertory of late, though this new album from Katharina Kammerloher and Johann Blanchard is the first to be given over entirely to her songs since Anne Sofie von Otter and Bengt Forsberg’s pioneering ‘Mots d’amour’ (DG, 2/02). Significantly, it sets out to be complementary to its predecessor rather than to eclipse or rival it: with only a single song, ‘L’été’, in common, the two discs actually take us into somewhat different territory.

Von Otter and Forsberg, their approach glancing towards café concert or even cabaret, give us a Chaminade of the boulevards, witty, knowing and urbane. Kammerloher and Blanchard, in contrast, are pensive and reined in, offering a programme of songs about love and loss, structured to reflect the turning of the seasons from spring to winter, and plotting an emotional trajectory from youthful ardour to sombre reflections attendant on time and experience.

Chaminade’s taste in poetry frequently inclined towards sentimentality, though you’re more than once struck here by the sincerity and emotional directness she could wrest from such mawkish texts as Georges Vanor’s ‘Souhait’ and Georges van Ormelingen’s ‘Madrigal’. Some of the songs in the darker second half really hit home, too. The ballad ‘La fiancée du soldat’ barely contains the emotions of its unnamed heroine, anxiously waiting for news of her soldier fiancé, while ‘Chanson naïve’ trawls through painful memories of a now dead lover. Most startling of all, perhaps, is ‘Jadis!’, a bitter reflection on physical decline in old age. If you thought of Chaminade simply as a purveyor of entertaining salon music, some of this might make you think again.

An ensemble member at Berlin’s Staatsoper, meanwhile (I heard her as a fine Ariadne auf Naxos Composer a few years ago), Kammerloher has an appealing high mezzo, with a silky tone and a subtle way with dynamics. There are some lovely floated top notes, for instance in ‘Fragilité’, that redeem a rather conventional song about the nature of mutability, while the surging lines of ‘Roulis des grèves’, an ecstatically observed seascape, are impeccably phrased. There are a few dropped consonants on occasion, but against that must be set Kammerloher’s evident commitment to this repertory, a quality she very much shares with Blanchard. He has given us Chaminade for MDG before, including discs of solo piano works (7/15) and (as pianist of the Parnassus Trio) of chamber music (7/17), and his playing here also has all the subtlety and finesse one could wish for. Jiyoon Lee, meanwhile, contributes sweet-toned solos to the handful of songs written or arranged for performance with piano and violin. A thoughtful disc that adds to our growing understanding of Chaminade, it’s well worth hearing.