In 2021 Sandrine Piau and the Orchestre Victor Hugo released an album of German lieder with orchestra, under the title of Clair-Obscur. This follow-up disc, Reflet, devoted to French orchestral songs, is designed to complete a diptych, made up of songs dealing with light, its reflections and ambiguities. The 13 settings here include just two complete works, which end the sequence – Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé and Britten’s astonishingly precocious Quatre Chansons Françaises, settings of Victor Hugo and Verlaine composed when he was just 14 – and before them comes a sequence of individual songs.
Given the velvety beauty and poise of Piau’s performances, it’s frustrating to get only one number, Le Spectre de la Rose, from Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Été, and just two by Duparc (one of them L’Invitation au Voyage), but the chance to hear much less well known settings by Charles Koechlin – two of his very early Quatre Poèmes d’Edmond Haraucourt and one of his Trois Mélodies Op 17, Épiphanie, which seems to me a tiny masterpiece – is more than enough compensation. But, really, every one of Piau’s performances is a gem: every phrase is elegantly turned and inimitably coloured, every word is savoured and crystal clear.
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