Soprano Soile Isokoski provides, as ever, a masterclass in smooth line and radiant tone in this disc of French music. Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer was completed a decade or so after Wagner’s death and a decade or so before Debussy’s La Mer, and it sounds that way, though it’s less fluid harmonically than either of those composers would have allowed. Isokoski’s singing has an inwardness that here could be mistaken for coolness, but it’s a performance that takes us into her confidence, and at the big moments she soars with the orchestra, even if one might ideally wish for a more voluptuously Wagnerian voice. John Storgårds and the Helsinki Philharmonic sound a little restrained here, but less so in Berlioz’s Nuits d’Été, in which they stretch and flex with Isokoski, again a poised, refined soloist. Three Duparc songs round things off, with orchestra and singer cresting the waves especially gleamingly in L’invitation au Voyage.
