This programme explores pre-war Ravel, Koechlin and Britten that happens to sit in the sweetest spots of Piau’s comfort zone, fully employing her deep-seated instincts about phrase-shaping. Without fuss or pretension, she informs the music’s most abstract moments. And there are plenty of those in the repertoire selection of music that’s a series of wide-awake dreams. Even the booklet notes could have been written by Pelléas’s Mélisande (but were co-authored by Piau). The disc’s concept is partly explained like this: ‘The reflection of an image embodies the idea of an echo, the shadow of a disquieting look-alike, a manifold flickering form, diffracted, eternally reborn, with a power to bewitch and deceive …’ Fine. I’m in – aided by Piau’s near-immaculate but thoughtfully strategic singing.

The Berlioz and Duparc selections pave the way for the possibly ideal middle road that Piau takes into the alien-but-inviting poetic and harmonic world of Ravel’s Mallarmé songs. Janet Baker embedded her superb legato into the instrumental textures, creating a glistening musical object that gives off shards of meaning in her classic recording (Decca, 4/67). The opposite extreme is the less suave Stéphane Degout, exposing the piece’s inner mechanics (in a piano version with Cédric Tiberghien – Harmonia Mundi, 7/22). Piau and Verdier evoke much imagery but explain none of it. The colour-shifting surfaces are balanced by subtle linguistic prominence, animating the text with emotional underpinning but never literalising it.

The delicacy of Verdier’s accompaniments with Besançon’s Orchestre Victor Hugo is particularly essential to the entrancing effect made by the well-chosen Koechlin songs, even if the harder-edged recording by Juliane Banse conducted by Heinz Holliger (SWR Classic) may be more in line with the composer’s stylistic preference.

Britten’s Quatre Chansons françaises, written in 1928 but not published until 1982, might seem like the conceptual wild card in this meeting of the composer’s amazingly confident 14-year-old mind and words by Hugo and Paul Verlaine. Music and text sometimes work at cross purposes in this melding of through-composed song and the dramatic personality of an opera scena (especially ‘L’enfance’, with its evolving nursery-rhyme quotations). In past decades, Felicity Lott owned these songs (Chandos, 6/89), her approach being larger-scale than Piau’s more allusive, intimate manner, which is a valid alternative. The demure ending of ‘Chanson d’automne’ makes a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion to the disc, though the only real misstep is the instrumental interludes, such as André Caplet’s orchestration of Debussy’s ‘Claire de lune’, which are meant to give breathing space between the vocal selections but actually sap the momentum of this otherwise smartly programmed recording.