Here’s a peach of a recital disc, wonderfully programmed. Louise Alder and Joseph Middleton begin with the familiar – Ravel’s perfumed Shéhérazade – and then segue into the byways of the French mélodie repertoire, much of it seldom heard, including Pauline Viardot, Cécile Chaminade and Alfred Bachelet.

Shéhérazade is usually recorded with orchestra, although its most winning recent recordings have been with piano – Marianne Crebassa (with Fazıl Say – Erato, 12/17) and Fatma Said (with Malcolm Martineau – Erato, 12/20). In ‘Asie’, Alder proves an eager voyager, with a real sense of longing in her repeated ‘je voudrais’ sighing phrases. Her tone is bright, though not as shiny as Said’s more silvery soprano, but her delivery of Tristan Klingsor’s heady texts is just as animated. If Crebassa’s dusky, veiled tones prove more alluring, that’s the natural advantage of mezzos in this cycle. Ravel’s orchestral colours are most keenly missed in ‘La flûte enchantée’ – no real flute (or ney, in Said’s case) snuck in here – but Middleton’s mellifluous playing is persuasive.

The piano accompaniments are sparer in the first two Messiaen songs, where Alder draws the listener into a more intimate atmosphere, ‘Le sourire’ trailing off into nothing. Once we get to ‘La fiancée perdue’, however, we bathe in Messiaen’s familiar religious glitter. At piano and pianissimo, Alder’s soprano possesses a lovely range of pastel colours – those half-sung, half-whispered confessions in Debussy’s ‘Apparition’ are exquisite, with a lovely ‘float’ on the penultimate line, ‘Passait, laissant toujours’. The voice occasionally hardens (close microphone placement?) at the top, such as in ‘La romance d’Ariel’. The trio of Pauline Viardot songs are superb, particularly ‘Haï luli!’, and the ‘Havanaise’ has a sexy, seductive lilt.

Alder does humour well – Wigmore Hall will surely never be the same after she released her breasts (pink balloons!) in an aria from Les mamelles de Tirésias in a recent recital – and she has a lot of fun in Canteloube’s ‘O up!’. Her relaxed delivery of the Poulenc and Satie numbers is a fine example of her engaging, communicative style.

Alfred Bachelet was a French composer and conductor who received the 1890 Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata Cléopâtre. He conducted at the Paris Opéra before serving as director of the Nancy Conservatoire. His worklist is negligible; but the song ‘Chère nuit’, a setting of Eugène Adénis-Colombeau composed in 1897, is a gem of a discovery. Alder welcomes the setting of the sun and the sweet scents of the garden as night descends in long, ecstatic phrases, sensitively echoed by Middleton’s piano. It’s truly deserving of the title-track in this beguiling recital.