This is utterly adorable from start to finish…In the booklet Piau speaks of her joy at performing this kind of repertoire and her rapture is palpable from the breathless opening moments of Saint-Saens’s ‘Extase’. Soaring above the luminous timbres of Julian Chauvin’s period ensemble Le Concert de la Loge, Piau’s fresh-voiced delight infuses Berlioz’s Villanelle’, Vierne’s ‘Beaux Papillons blancs’ and Bordes’s affable ‘Promenade matinale’.

This CD, a mix of the familiar but more of the unfamiliar, is an absolute winner. Piau sounds still in wonderfully youthful voice, full and steady. This CD is brim full of elegance and grace and she blends well with the orchestra who are right with her. The sound is excellent, well balanced, and clear, especially on the headphones. As ever with Alpha, this is a good production with a useful booklet and thankfully full texts and translations. For any passionate listeners of mélodies and Lieder, head to the shops immediately!

With her silvery tone, immaculate sense of line and telling if understated way with words, Piau is very much at home in this repertory…[Chauvin and his orchestra] are outstanding throughout, unearthing subtleties in music that is often quite simply but always effectively scored. It’s a most engaging disc.

The French soprano’s in lustrous voice on this almost indecently gorgeous album of orchestral songs with the period instruments of Le Concert de la Loge: Saint-Saëns’s butterfly flutters exquisitely, Charles Bordes’s Promenade matinale has a louche seductiveness worthy of Piaf, and the two songs from Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été are thrown into fascinating relief by the tracks which surround them (Massenet’s Le poète et le fantôme surely shares its DNA with Au cimitière, and both are despatched with an uncanny beauty here).

Undoubtedly one of the most enchantingly beautiful recordings I’ve heard all year: from the very first entry of Sandrine Piau’s exquisite voice in Saint-Saëns’s tender setting of Victor Hugo’s poem, Extase, I was completely captivated. Piau is given fantastic support from Julien Chavin and Le Concert de la Loge, including some nimble butterfly-effects from the principal flute in Saint-Saëns’s Papillons.

With a bell-like, very French-sounding soprano and crystalline diction, Piau revels in a survey of orchestral songs that includes Berlioz’s Au cimetière and Villanelle, from Les Nuits d’été, and his orchestration of Martini’s Plaisir d’amour.

Songs by Berlioz, Saint-Saëns and Duparc jostle with some unfamiliar gems by composers you’ve probably never heard of, in a programme of French miniatures that’s a pleasure from start to finish.

Piau has chosen songs with orchestra, from Berlioz to Massenet, with some lesser known composers in-between, such as Godard, Bordes and Dubois. The programme embraces the themes of Souvenir and Désir et Séduction and Piau’s soprano wafts, cajoles and caresses the phrases with a great variety of colours, from the fizz of champagne to a full-bodied red. She makes it all sound easy and has the art of seeming natural and spontaneous. Julien Chauvin conducts with an equally delicate touch.