The previous volumes in this series have concentrated on Poulenc’s songs with piano. Here, though, the musical horizons broaden out to take in various cycles that call for the accompaniment of variegated instrumental ensembles. Indeed, the Rapsodie nègre, composed in 1917 and Poulenc’s earliest surviving work, is hardly a song-cycle at all, since four of its five movements are for instruments alone while the central one, ‘Honoloulou’, is set to nonsense words from some purportedly (but almost certainly spoof) Liberian verse penned by a poet who went under the nom de plumeMakoko Kangourou. Here Poulenc’s thinking is in line with Milhaud’s Africa-orientated ballet La création du monde, and the colouring he brings to it with flute, clarinet, string quartet and piano is alive with exoticism and wit. The baritone Thomas Oliemans solemnly and lucidly intones the twaddle of ‘Honoloulou’.

There are similar melodic inflections associated with the camel in the first song of Le bestiare (1918 19), but here Poulenc is dealing with acknowledged poetry by Apollinaire, epigrammatic cameos of the animal kingdom, which Oliemans and Thomas Allen interpret with captivating charm and character. Allen is also the exuberant soloist in the so-called ‘cantate profane’ Le bal masqué, a wonderful surrealist romp of 1932 that in its angular turns of phrase, its distinctive instrumental timbres and high spirits has much in common with the piano-and-wind Sextet conceived at about the same time.

The tenor Joshua Ellicott eloquently voices the alternating weirdness and volatility of the Quatre Poèmes de Max Jacob (1921); and in the two sets that require piano accompaniment only, Ann Murray is spry in the 1931 Quatre Poèmes d’Apollinaire (wrongly spelt ‘Appolinaire’ in the booklet texts), and Catherine Wyn-Rogers is seductively expressive in the Banalités of 1941. The instrumental ensembles, thoroughly in tune with Poulenc’s personality, add piquancy to a delightful disc.