‘An interior musical vibration invoking roots, emotions, passion, poetry and play, challenging the imprint of time, without denying its existence’, is how a booklet note dauntingly describes this new recital of American and British songs from Adèle Charvet and Susan Manoff. The album, mercifully, is by no means as complicated or abstruse as you might think. Manoff has become so closely associated with the French repertory through her work with such singers as Véronique Gens and Sandrine Piau that we tend to forget she hails from New York, where Charvet, born in France, also spent her childhood, and both performers, it would seem, have been keen to tackle the 20th-century English-language repertory for some time.

Their programme, on the surface, is fancifully organised, with ‘the idea of the turning wheel of cyclical time’ at its centre and the songs grouped according to symbolic associations with the points of the compass, so East signifies ‘childhood and play’, West stands for ‘renunciation and the metamorphoses of all things’, and so on. In fact, its outline straightforwardly suggests the progress of life from youth to age, opening and closing with statements of spiritual affirmation from Copland’s Old American Songs, and examining themes of love and loss, before closing with a touching celebration of the pleasures of sleep, solitude and the insights afforded by experience and time.

Much of it is beautifully done. Charvet has a warm, appealing mezzo, with a tangy lower register and fine dynamic control at the top. She’s at her best in jazz-inflected or declamatory numbers, where her wide range impresses and the texts hit home. Copland’s ‘Zion’s Walls’ really does sound like gospel music here (as it should) rather than art song, and both Roven’s ‘Listening to Jazz’ and Bolcom’s ‘Amor’ bristle with bravado and wit. Barber’s ‘Solitary Hotel’, with its clipped vocal line, suits her down to the ground, while Britten’s ‘Funeral Blues’ starts a bit too mutedly but rises to a real snarl of grief and outrage at its climax.

In more lyrical songs, however, the somewhat close recording catches a pulse that creeps into her middle registers, which occasionally proves intrusive, most notably perhaps in Vaughan Williams’s ‘Silent Noon’, despite the intelligence she brings to it. Manoff, though, as one might expect, is consistently stylish and wonderfully insightful throughout: there’s some marvellous playing here as the bells of Barber’s Zion ring out proudly at the start, a flurry of anticipation interrupts the sad tango of the Solitary Hotel and Britten’s blues become increasingly fierce and distraught. Though not perfect, it’s a consistently engaging recital, the best of which is very fine indeed.