Thierry Félix’s Debussy recital was recorded in 1995 but seems largely to have been overlooked on its first release a year later. It’s a striking disc, however, carefully programmed and, at its best, engagingly done. Félix, who gave up his performing career for the church some years ago and was ordained a deacon in 2013, gives us the late songs (from 1904 onwards) complete, prefaced by ‘Mandoline’, ‘Dans le jardin’ and the Trois Mélodies de Verlaine from 1891. His lightish, agile bass-baritone is attractive and his way with words consistently deft. The rapid shifts between irony and sincerity in the Villon ballads are beautifully done, though he’s at his best in the Verlaine sets, with their imagery of sexual and emotional regret: ‘Le son du cor s’afflige vers les bois’ from Trois Mélodies sounds very desolate; ‘Colloque sentimentale’ which closes the second Fêtes galantes, is marvellous in its melancholy bitterness.

Félix’s pianist Stany David Lasry, meanwhile, plays an 1874 Érard – the type of instrument that Debussy himself would have used as a Conservatoire student and for which many of his earlier piano works would have been written. This in itself may recommend the disc to many, and there’s a wonderful clarity in the sound, which allows Lasry to emphasise countless points of detail, whether in the surging seascape of ‘La mer est plus belle que les cathédrales’ from the Mélodies de Verlaine or the flickers of colour and ambiguous harmonies that underscore the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. The downside is that the recording, on occasion, places Lasry too far forwards and Félix too far back, which at times threatens to unbalance things, the opening ‘Mandoline’ above all.