Wherever Berlioz went, he was accompanied by the sound of moulds breaking. This was not always appreciated, as we know, by his contemporaries, but personally I can’t get enough of it and I look forward to more during the composer’s bicentenary in the coming year. Of course if breaking things were all he did, there would be little joy in that. It was what he put in place of the shattered formulae that grips our attention today.

It is surprising that his songs are not better known. Anyone who thinks Les nuits d’été constitutes a summary of his vocal production need only listen to this disc to be disabused. And I hope they do, together with anyone else who either loves Berlioz or is interested in 19th-century French song.

Jérôme Corréas has so far tended to specialise in Baroque music and his dark, warm bass-baritone is surprisingly flexible in its articulation, with an especially tender mezza voce. Berlioz’s roots are not generally thought to extend further back than Gluck, but Corréas’s well-focused tone and shapely phrasing strike me as ideal for this music.

Certainly Berlioz’s vocal lines, asymmetrical and often plain weird, have little to do with Viennese Classicism. Corréas embraces the asymmetry, but is ingenious in finding some logic in the composer’s most outlandish effusions, and (oh joy!) you can hear every word.

Arthur Schoonderwoerd draws wonderful sounds from an 1836 Pleyel and in a song like Elégie en prose you can sense Duparc in the making. The other supporting artists are all excellent – I particularly enjoyed Christophe Coin’s cello playing in the marvellous ‘Premiers transports’.

The spacious church acoustic, with up to a three-second echo, is not ideal, but I know traffic-free venues in Paris are hard to find. More puzzling is the running order in which eight of the nine songs of Irlande (excluding ‘Hélène’) are dispersed among others. But a careful reading of Rémy Stricker’s informative notes makes everything clear, except the authors of the poems, who are nowhere credited.