When asked if he had known the members of Les Six, Ned Rorem replied, ‘Yes, I knew all five of them’. As Graham Johnson writes in the booklet with this CD, Louis Durey became ‘the orphan’ of the group. He was the first to distance himself from the others, and did not take part in their most famous collaboration, Les mariés de la tour Eiffel.

All the songs gathered here are from 1918-19 (when Durey was 30), so just before the critic Henri Collet coined the group’s name. Erik Satie had been one of the major influences on Milhaud and the others, and Blaise Cendrars’s poem Hommage à Erik Satie is the first item. Before the invention of Les Six, Satie had already coined the epithet ‘Nouveaux jeunes’. Cendrars wrote the poem under the title ‘Musikissme’ (an elaborate Anglo-French pun on ‘musique’ and ‘kiss me’). This and the three little Chansons basques are all surrealist poetry, with spare accompaniment from Durey.

The earliest work here, and the most important, is the song cycle Images à Crusoé. This is a setting of seven poems by the Nobel Prize winner Saint-John Perse. In these poems the elderly Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday are living once again in civilisation, their island is just a memory. Friday’s laughter has become ‘depraved’, Crusoe languishes in an armchair. Perse’s symbolist poetry is matched by Durey’s vivid music, leaping from image to image, then lapsing into melancholy. Even now this seems like music of surprising invention and originality. The longest song, ‘Visitation’, is the old man’s evocation of an evening on the island: the birds, the water and the breeze all seem to wait for the stars to ‘crackle in the sky’. The cycle suits Francois Le Roux, with his nowadays much darker and dryer voice.

Despite my admiration for previous volumes in this French season that Le Roux and Johnson have recorded (Saint-Saëns, 5/97 and Séverac, A/98), I think this is the most successful. The setting of Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire (all the poems, not just a selection like Poulenc chose), the two Heine romantic songs, the brief and lovely Inscriptions sur un Oranger and the almost skittish Epigrammes de Théocrite are all contrasts in mood.

It’s hard to imagine Durey’s songs ever becoming popular in the way those of Poulenc have, but they surely deserve more attention, and the Crusoé cycle is one of the key works of its time, a postwar expression of regret and loss, using the fictional Defoe characters but clearly referring to the present.