Having admired Natalie Dessay in operatic repertoire ranging from Handel to Massenet and Strauss, I’m sorry not to be more enthusiastic about her first recorded foray into Lieder. These days her famously agile, diamond-bright soprano léger has lost some of its former freshness and ease, while what David Patrick Stearns, in his review of Dessay’s Debussy album (Virgin, 3/12), dubbed her ‘Metropolitan Opera vibrato’ can widen into a disconcerting beat on sustained notes. Call me precious, but I found the two repeated climaxes of ‘Du bist die Ruh’ barely tolerable. Nor was I enamoured of her habit of sliding into notes from below, often effective in Italian opera, but here – say, in Mignon’s ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ – compromising the purity and simplicity of Schubert’s lines.

As you might suspect, Dessay is at her best in Schubert’s lighter, brighter songs: tender and intimate in the Schubertised bel canto of ‘Am Bach im Frühling’ and singing ‘Geheimes’ with a mingled innocence and pent-up excitement. If you don’t insist on a silken legato, she is fine in ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’, sensitive in the hushed sadness of the central section, nimble and smiling in the final Allegretto. She is gently touching, too, in the nostalgic ‘Im Frühling’. Even here, though, I craved more tonal variety and a more specific engagement with the text. These limitations are more serious in ‘Gretchen’, which needs more urgency of feeling at the start, and deeper, warmer shadings as it progresses, and ‘Erlkönig’, which for all Dessay’s evident sense of drama remains too monochrome (and the Erlking himself too harmless). As her discs of Debussy and Poulenc (Virgin 10/15) confirmed, few modern singers match her vivid – and seductive – way with French. By comparison her German tends to be too soft-focused, not least in a blurred ‘Rastlose Liebe’.

While my pleasure in Dessay’s singing was decidedly mixed, Philippe Cassard consistently caught the ear with his discerning ‘voicing’ and felicities of touch and timing. Indeed, the track I enjoyed most here was Liszt’s glittering piano transcription of ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’. Which can’t be quite right.