Roderick Williams and Roger Vignoles explore French song-cycles, familiar or otherwise, in an engaging recital, which also adds into the mix Williams’s own Les ténèbres de l’amour, written in 1994 for the baritone Henry Wickham to perform at a Park Lane Group concert the following year. Intended as a companion piece to La bonne chanson, it draws its texts from the same Verlaine collection as Fauré’s masterpiece, though the mood, reflecting Verlaine’s frustration at his protracted engagement to Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, is altogether darker, an expression of impatience that teeters on bitterness. Vocal lines are declamatory, the piano-writing sparse and hard-edged. Williams sings it with a reined-in intensity that conveys sullen anger masked by desire, before the final song, ‘Nous sommes en les temps infâmes’, offers a tentative, possibly illusory suggestion of hope. The fragmentary, pointillistic piano figurations add to the prevailing sense of unease. It’s impressive, if at times hard to like. La bonne chanson itself is not included, for some reason; one would have liked to have heard the two cycles side by side.

Elsewhere there is much to enjoy. Beginning with Fauré’s Mirages, the recital is constructed as if it were an actual concert, with a brief pause after Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée to indicate the placing of the interval, before Les ténèbres opens the second half. Debussy’s ‘Beau soir’ forms an encore after the main programme. There are discoveries along the way, not least the two cycles by Honegger: Petit cours de morale sets aphoristic texts by Jean Giraudoux with a knowing urbanity worthy of Poulenc; Saluste du Bartas, stylistically reminiscent at times of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, examines the amatory career of a 16th-century Huguenot poet in love with Marguerite of Navarre. André Caplet’s Cinq Ballades françaises, meanwhile, written in the aftermath of the First World War, during which Caplet was injured, at once ambiguously celebrates survival and hankers after an untroubled, simple life in the wake of catastrophe.

The performances are excellent. Mirages gets one of its finest outings on disc, discreetly erotic and beautifully understated. Williams’s control of verbal inflection and dynamic gradation is immaculate here, admirably matched by the unforced subtlety of Vignoles’s playing. The balance between swagger and tender sincerity in Don Quichotte à Dulcinée is finely judged and contrasts nicely with the more fanciful wit of Saluste du Bartas. The cool ironies of Petit cours de morale, meanwhile, similarly offset Williams’s more forthright way with Poulenc’s Max Jacob settings in Parisiana, and the troubling complexities of the great Deux Poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire. Vignoles, superb throughout, really comes into his own in the Caplet, where the vocal line frequently gives way to extended piano passages of considerable depth and beauty.