Here is something to delight all but the most misanthropic listeners. Even by their own standards, this is one of the most enterprising CDs Anne Sofie von Otter and Bengt Forsberg have made. Although Cécile Chaminade’s piano music has never been entirely neglected, her songs have remained firmly locked away. Chaminade composed over 125 mélodies at the height of her fame between 1890 and 1910; she was equally popular as a pianist and composer, in 1907 giving a 25-concert tour in the USA.

Like many of her contemporaries, Mme Chaminade’s choice of poems veers towards the sentimental and sometimes sugary. There are images of eyes like emeralds, of a lover as a bird ‘drunk with the blue sky’ and another as a gardener of the heavens, about to ‘gather stars for you’. Von Otter and Forsberg open with one of Chaminade’s most popular songs, Ronde d’amour. It is also one of the very few to have been recorded before – by the 80-year-old Lucien Fugère in 1928 (Symposium, 6/93). He sings it more as a folksong, von Otter tilts it towards the theatre, taking it very fast and with some lovely playful half-spoken effects. La lune paresseuse that follows, with a beautiful rippling melody in the accompaniment, shows Chaminade in a more ecstatic vein, the singer offering a prayer to the moon, in the words of one Charles de Bussy.

Sombrero is a typical bit of Spanish colour, with more than a hint of Carmen. Mignonne, words by Ronsard, is slow and simple, a vivid response to this famous verse. L’anneau d’argent is the only Chaminade song that most people might be familiar with – Fugère recorded this too, as has Robert White more recently (Hyperion, 2/96). Rosemonde Gérard’s poem about the wedding ring – or is it only a token? – ends in a satin-lined coffin.

These five songs basically set the mood for the whole recital, moving back and forth between the romantic, the exotic and the whimsical. In the hands and the voice of lesser artists, Chaminade’s songs might seem hoplessly dated, but von Otter and Forsberg so obviously relish the elegant vocal lines and the really imaginative (and demanding) piano parts.

The last part of the disc includes six instrumental pieces, typical of the belle époque, but also exhilarating in their tunefulness and brio. Nils-Erik Sparf plays the three violin pieces, including Kreisler’s arrangement of the Sérénade espagnol, and also joins in the pastiche 18th-century Menuet, ‘Dans votre robe à grands paniers’. In the pieces for two pianos Forsberg and Peter Jablonski bring the recital to an end with the slightly dotty Danse païenne. A totally entrancing CD from two of the greatest explorers of repertory.