Marianne Crebassa’s ‘Séguedilles’ has its origins in family history. Her maternal grandparents, she tells us in a booklet note, were Spanish. The youngest in her family, she never knew them, though they have always lived for her in her mother’s stories and photograph albums. This album is consequently an exploration of her own dual heritage, its programme ‘a marriage of France and Spain, two interlinked cultures’, put together ‘with great fondness’ – and also, one might add, with remarkable intelligence and brilliance.

The influence of each country’s music and culture on the other’s is tellingly and insightfully examined through juxtaposition, contrast and shifting perspectives. Excerpts from five operas, four French, one Spanish, form the recital’s backbone, but whereas Bizet, Massenet, Offenbach and Ravel all view their Spanish heroines as self-assured and independent, Falla’s Salud (La vida breve – premiered in France, not in Spain) tragically defines her life in relation to the man who dominates it. The songs that thread their way through it, meanwhile, are fascinating. We find Saint-Saëns and Ravel setting texts in Spanish, while the ‘Séguedille’ from Falla’s 1908 Mélodies is in French, though stylistically this is very much the Seven Popular Spanish Songs in embryo. Debussy’s influence looms large over Jésus Guridi’s Canciones castellanas, while Mompou’s beautiful Combat del somni – written between 1942 and 1948 to surreal Catalan texts by Josep Janés and orchestrated in 1965 – reveals a debt to Fauré, Mompou’s great idol.

Crebassa is in tremendous voice throughout, her lower registers dark and burnished, her top notes warm, clear and effortless. The operatic heroines are immaculately characterised, so that with each we get a sense of the wider dramatic and narrative context of the work. So Carmen’s deep yet controlled sensuality, leaving Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s José sounding shell-shocked at the end of ‘Près des remparts de Séville’, offsets Dulcinée’s world-weary hauteur and ennui, while her Périchole, again with de Barbeyrac as Piquillo, suggests a brilliant woman living off her wits, in contrast to the wry humour of Ravel’s Concepción, giving into amused self-pity in a moment of sexual frustration. In ‘¡Vivan los que rien!’, her Salud is every bit as good as Victoria de los Ángeles and Teresa Berganza in their respective complete recordings, and someone should seriously think about giving us Crebassa’s Salud complete, as well. We could also, for that matter, do with her Carmen in its entirety.

The songs are wonderful, too, particularly the bravado of Falla’s ‘Séguedille’ and the sensuous if elusive mystery of Mompou’s cycle. Limitations of space, one suspects, mean we only get four of Guridi’s six Canciones and again you end up hankering for the rest. For Saint-Saëns’s Desdichado, a barbed reflection on male amatory discomfiture, she’s paired with soprano Adriana González, their voices blending wonderfully together. Crebassa’s collaborators are all, in fact, excellent here. De Barbeyrac is just as involved and committed as she is in their duets. Alphonse Cemin is her fine pianist in most of the songs, though Massenet’s ‘Nuit d’Espagne’ comes with its accompaniment handsomely arranged for guitarist Thibaut Garcia. The Toulouse chorus and orchestra under Ben Glassberg are similarly flawless and exciting over a wide stylistic range: there’s some really lovely playing here, beautifully textured. Outstanding, every single second of it.