Time and again, one’s ears search for something subversive, some sort of coded protest in the music of these often-forgotten composers of the belle époque. But that’s my 21st-century applying a particular social function that wasn’t encountered on this particular compositional landscape.

The one exception in this collection is ‘Les lavandières’ (‘The Washerwomen’) by Augusta Holmès (1847-1903) – a song that reflects the compassion for the working class that one associates with her near-exact contemporary Émile Zola. Far from the genteel mellifluousness that defined 1870s France, Holmès’s vocal line is wrought in decisive musical sentences with a halting piano accompaniment that assures the message won’t be lost.

The album’s title has to be taken with a grain of salt. Some of these composers were only newborns during the belle époque, and some of the names aren’t ombres (or shadows) but have been a presence in modern times: among them Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), whose deeply felt ‘Haï luli’ has been well represented on disc, and Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), who has been firmly re-established in recent years as a key figure in French culture, both as a pianist and as a composer.

Whatever the composition dates, most of the music here earns its belle époque affiliation with a mainstream musical language of that time – you might call it the Gounod zone with anticipations or echoes of Debussy – though one’s musical expectations are often delightfully thwarted. The quartet of songs by Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937) that opens the disc initially seems to be business as usual until ‘Invocation’ soars up to an out-of-left-field high A that discreetly establishes a welcome alternative logic at work. Her setting of ‘Ave Maria’ is fearlessly personal: it has no allegiances to the hymnlike settings that have come before it, and seems to have been written completely out of inner need rather than for public consumption.

Other songs on this disc similarly seem to have been written with nothing to prove and little sense of ambition. It’s music for friends. Armande de Polignac (1876-1962) pushes harmonic boundaries in ‘Jardin du roi’ but in the service of words about ‘daughters of old Saturn’. Holmès’s ‘C’est un oiseau du bois sauvage’ finds the composer in the thick of Carl Loewe ballad territory in ways that have more charm and harmonic awareness than her German counterpart.

Soprano Laetitia Grimaldi and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz take a measured, even reserved approach. Hélène Guilmette brings a more extroverted sensibility and forward vocal production to much of the same repertoire (Analekta) and Anne Sofie von Otter, on her pioneering Chaminade disc (DG, 2/02), goes happily over the top in ‘Villanelle’ – a quality also heard in Chaminade’s own playful recordings (now on Symposium or APR). But with her attractive, full-bodied voice, fine sense of contour in the vocal lines and beautiful French, Grimaldi reveals what’s there in songs that existed not necessarily for the theatre but for their own sake.