“Asie!”, Christiane Karg sighs at the beginning of Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade, and you can sense her excitement as she describes an imaginary Asia and its assault on the senses. There’s a similar immediacy to her singing throughout these settings of sensuous French poetry, her delivery poised in the sweet spot between urgency and a heavy-lidded, don’t-rush-me languor. Her liquid soprano hardens only occasionally, Piaf-like, on the very lowest notes; it’s lighter than one usually hears in this music, but it works, intoxicatingly. After the Ravel come Debussy’s Baudelaire settings, as orchestrated in idiomatic and sometimes quasi-Wagnerian style by John Adams, and poetry by Hugo and Verlaine, set with astonishing maturity by the 14-year-old Britten; she ends on some gorgeously expansive Duparc. She’s at one with David Afkham’s smoothly responsive orchestra, but manages to impart the feeling that she’s singing everything in her own sweet time – this music’s style to a T.
