Having already earned plaudits for his first two volumes of Debussy songs (5/03, 6/12), Malcolm Martineau here partners the soprano Jennifer France and the baritone Jonathan McGovern for another 26 of them, focusing on a dozen to texts by Théodore de Banville and five to poems by Paul Bourget, together with a handful of miscellaneous ones and a group of four that were only recently rediscovered.

One inescapable factor is the impact that the soprano voice of Marie-Blanche Vasnier had on Debussy. Right at the start of this disc we have four of the Bourget songs that were among the ones in which he capitalised on Vasnier’s capacity to explore the stratosphere – indeed the mesosphere – of the soprano range. In ‘Musique’, ‘Silence ineffable de l’heure’, ‘La romance d’Ariel’ and ‘Regret’, and then again in the Charles Cros setting ‘L’archet’, Jennifer France negotiates the upper-altitude territory both with accuracy and with sensitivity to the songs’ moods, with smoothness of line matching her subtlety of vocal inflection. After these high-wire acrobatics, Jonathan McGovern shows himself to be thoroughly at home within the normal baritone register for the two Maurice Bouchor songs, ‘Chanson triste’ and ‘Les baisers d’amour’, lyrically astute, eloquently poised.

While most of the songs here are for soprano and are well chosen and varied within themselves, the placing of McGovern’s seven for baritone provides pools of reflectiveness, adding to the impression that Martineau, whose pianism is a constant delight, has devised a proper recital programme rather than a completist survey.