Contes

"'Contes', Sandrine Piau tells us in a booklet interview, forms the second panel of a diptych with 'Voyage intime', her first recital with David Kadouch (3/23), and like the latter is a complex album that inhabits territory at once beautiful and unsettling. Its starting points are fairy tales (the 'contes' of the title), lullabies, nursery rhymes, folk poetry, variations on narratives we encounter in childhood. But fairy tales can be 'horrible stories', Piau reminds us, and their innate darkness leads, as the album progresses, to confrontations with fear, loss, mortality and the depths of human cruelty.

It opens with the airy brightness of Attic Greece, where Jeanne Bernard's Bilitis (very different from Debussy's heroine) tells tales to a group of children before contentedly singing a lullaby to her daughter. It closes, however, quietly facing the horror at the centre of the 20th century, with Ilse Weber's 'Wiegala', written in Theresienstadt, and sung by Weber to her son as they were taken to Auschwitz. It's a heartbreaking ending, haunted by tragic family histories: Kadouch's grandmother and Piau's grandfather were Holocaust survivors, and in their booklet interview, they discuss the impact of their stories on their own childhoods with touching frankness.

A haunting album of songs reflecting different, sometimes dark, aspects of fairy tales and childhood, performed with expressive depth and elegance by soprano Sandrine Piau and pianist David Kadouch." Gramophone Editor's Choice Oct 26