Though she begins with four songs by Duparc, including the most famous of all, L’Invitation au Voyage, and includes eight settings by Debussy as well, mezzo Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s lovely recital with pianist Pascal Jourdan reaches into some of the less-familiar niches of the French repertoire, too. As well as songs by Lili Boulanger and Reynaldo Hahn, there are four songs here by Jacques de La Presle – a new name to me – who was a teacher and organist as well as a composer, and whose own music, to judge from this tiny sample, was close to Poulenc in its spirit and deft lightness of touch. D’Oustrac moves between all these strikingly varied musical personalities with tremendous skill and total commitment. The pair of Hahn’s songs with which she ends, La Chère Blessure and À Chloris, may be dangerously sentimental, but d’Oustrac sings them with such elegance and serious intent that she makes them utterly convincing.
