Massenet wrote over 300 songs during the course of his career, mostly with piano accompaniment, though he also orchestrated nearly 40 of them. In either version, they remain relatively little known, rarely recorded and in some cases still unpublished. There have, of course, been sporadic exceptions: Richard Bonynge, for instance, recorded some 20 of the piano originals with Huguette Tourangeau in the mid-1970s (Decca, 7/77). The orchestral versions, however, have received scant attention until now: of the 25 pieces included in Bru Zane’s beautiful new album, only four have been recorded before, and of those, two are brief instrumental numbers used as interludes between song groups.

You’re frequently left pondering the reason for their neglect. Certainly the much-voiced charge of ‘sugary sentimentalism’ (Pierre Bernac’s words) only holds up to scrutiny here in the case of ‘Les enfants’, to a rather cloying text by Georges Boyer. Many inhabit emotional and sometimes stylistic territory familiar from Massenet’s operas. Love and desire are often expressed with refined subtlety, as in Manon or Thaïs, with vocal lines that hover between recitative and melody, and religious subjects, such as ‘Souvenez-vous, Vierge Marie!’, a setting of Bernard of Clairvaux, provoke the swirling, ecstatic sensuousness we find in the oratorio La Vierge. Many were written for singers who regularly performed Massenet’s operas, and though the vocal writing is rarely overtly showy (the coloratura of ‘Marquise’ is an exception), one notices the frequent deployment of wide vocal ranges and sustained, climactic high notes. The orchestrations, meanwhile, are for smallish forces, usually strings with a handful of wind instruments, though harp and piano sometimes thread their way through the textures.

Six singers, all of them Bru Zane regulars, share the songs between them. Véronique Gens’s warm tone is heard to fine effect in ‘Souvenez-vous, Vierge Marie!’ and the passionate yet refined ‘On dit!’. Nicole Car’s lyrical way with ‘Amoureuse’ and her bravura approach to the exacting ‘L’improvisatore’ offset Jodie Devos’s crystalline soprano, floating with admirable poise through the ‘Musette’ and ‘Crépuscule’, which balletomanes will recognise from Leighton Lucas’s arrangement in the score for Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. ‘Marquise’ is delivered with considerable bravado, great hauteur and a slightly metallic gleam in her voice by Chantal Santon Jeffery.

Étienne Dupuis, meanwhile, has fun with the ironically entitled ‘Hymne d’amour’, not a hymn but almost a breezy music-hall song, and joins Car for the programme’s only duet, ‘Les fleurs’, nicely done, though the piece itself is not vintage Massenet. Cyrille Dubois, stylish as always, opens the album with the exquisite ‘Pensée de printemps’ and closes it with ‘La chanson de Musette’, from Massenet’s incidental music to a play based on Murger’s La vie de bohème, about (rather than sung by) the same character as Puccini’s Musetta. The song’s café-concert scoring is nicely brought out here by the Paris Chamber Orchestra under Hervé Niquet. He is wonderfully alert to the mood and tone of each song, and the playing is delectable throughout. It’s a lovely album, and I look forward to the second volume, which is apparently in the offing.