The overture to this recital of almost symphonic proportions was provided by two of the Oxford Lieder Festival’s Emerging Artists.

Soprano Angharad Rowlands and pianist Joseph Cavalli-Price, both already multiple prize-winners, had curated an imaginative programme, focussing first on French poetry and music from Paul Verlaine and Claude Debussy. “En sourdine” (“Muted”) set the tone with rich, sonorous opening chords in the accompaniment, supporting Rowlands’ velvet, soaring lyricism as the nightingale’s song overcame, finally, the voice of despair. This was followed by “Fantoches”, a humorous song referencing Scaramouche and Pulcinella, stock characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as a handsome Spanish pirate. Here, the soprano contrasted well the sense of impish fun with the powerful song of the “lovelorn nightingale”. Finally, Cavalli-Price’s piano positively shimmered in “Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”), and Rowlands’ voice was suddenly marble itself, exactly what the nocturnal scene demanded.

In the centre of their mini-recital came one of its highlights. Richard Strauss’s “Das Rosenband” (“The Rose Garland”). Its characteristic enharmonic sequences enabled Rowlands to portray so sweetly the slumbering maiden and the young lover sensing Paradise as he watched her. She illustrated this passionately in her singing of “Leben” (“life”). In the final group of three songs by Edvard Grieg, the duo performed with complete authority. A rose is greeted as a lover’s proxy in “Gruss” (“Greeting”), the soprano positively twinkling at the end of Heine’s poem. Cavalli-Price sensitively brought out the melody of the broken soul and sounded the village bells with insistent emphasis, his final, sad chord the perfect complement to Rowlands’ movingly portrayed despair and grief. Finally, in “Ein Traum” (“A dream”), the duo together communicated so well with, it seemed, every member of the audience. The delight and ecstasy of the soprano telling how dream became reality built to a perfectly judged climax of telling passion.

**

“La bonne Chanson” was composed by Gabriel Fauré in the 1890s, to texts mostly by Paul Verlaine as a cycle of nine songs for voice and piano, but heard here in the later version he created for voice, piano and string quartet. Saint-Saëns, after hearing it, remarked that Fauré had gone mad. The audience would clearly not have agreed. Soprano Marie-Laure Garnier and pianist Célia Oneto Bensaid were joined by Quatuor Hanson who between them gave a compelling performance of this demanding collection. Garnier has a voice of spectacular power at its fullest, yet is also able to coax the most refined pianissimo as in her final notes resolving in high, exquisite beauty at the end of “La lune blanche” (“The white moon”), or in her soaring, delicate joy to conclude “J’allais par des chemins perfides” (“I walked along treacherous ways”). Throughout, the quartet and piano were both accompaniment and raconteur, separately or together. There were repeated moments of striking colour from the strings, especially when playing in different paired combinations in unison; and atmospheric individual solos when accompanying the soprano, for example from the viola in “Avant que tu t'en ailles” (“Before you fade”). Here the quartet produced a fittingly melodramatic orchestral sound and also, just at the end, a glimpse of shimmering gold. Oneto Bensaid proved a highly alert accompanist and virtuoso soloist in her own right, perhaps especially in her playful role at the start of “L’hiver a cessé” (“Winter is over”), and also in “Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été” (“So, on a bright summer day it shall be”).

Appropriately for this vocal and instrumental septet, the programme featured French composers, including Charlotte Sohy (d.1955), whose Three Nostalgic Songs included a wonderfully plaintive cello solo, shivering staccato in the strings, lost bells in the piano, and poignant portrayals of the weariness of life from the soprano.

For the songs by Ernest Chausson, Garnier dispensed with her tablet of sheet music, and her performance was transformed. Now she projected every nuance of emotion with a directness not otherwise seen so effectively. In “Chanson perpetuelle” (“Song without end”), after the quartet had set the scene of desolation and lost love, Garnier hardly held back the pathos as she asked the nightingales to tell her beloved she was dying. Yet there was power too, when singing of him; and a heart-stopping, meltingly beautiful moment when she announced that he had become her lover; followed by her piercing shriek of grief at his death; before the real, sepulchral horror at the realisation of his absence – a grim ending in C sharp minor, remorselessly honed by Oneto Bensaid’s honest, fateful playing.

It was Chausson again who provided the monumental final item on the programme, for this reviewer the very heart of the recital. ”Poème de l’amour et de la mer” (“Poem of love and the sea”), composed in the 1890s, comprises two extended poems by Maurice Bouchor, a friend of Chausson, with an instrumental interlude, lasting in total around 25 minutes. At the time he began the work, he travelled to Bayreuth to hear operas by Wagner, so it was perhaps not surprising that the scale of the ”Poème” felt at times almost Wagnerian, even with the present chamber music resources (a version for full orchestra does exist).

The first song, “La fleur des eaux” (“The flower of the waters”), introduces us to rich scents but also other senses, the accompaniment floating, quivering, before opening full throttle to reflect the Rhine-like waters in an almost cinematic interlude. Garnier reached new heights of emotion when singing of the figure on the shore, soaring over the quartet which flew metaphorically overhead and melting at the roses raining down. Drama followed: as so often in this recital, there was a moment of parting between lovers, a sense conveyed by the whole ensemble that the protagonist’s soul was departing too, and after a bitter, lonely silence, the final two lines in which the virtuosity of the soprano was given free rein, and the pianist responded by drawing out the full, symphonic power of the Steinway. Puzzlingly, the programme indicated that the Interlude was for solo piano, but in fact both piano and quartet were fully involved here, a poignant cello solo reflecting on the lost lover, the viola adding a sad and elegiac commentary, the slow march-like tread seeming eerily to come from beyond the grave. At last, the soprano could have a well-earned rest.

In the final song, “Mort de l’Amour” (“The death of love”), Garnier exuded a sense of consolation in her glowing, autumnal timbre, smiling at the memories, but suddenly aghast at the dead leaves. She grew in musical stature here (communicating so much more directly without the barrier of the tablet), operatic over the pulsating strings, and sharing with all of us the horror felt at her dead lover, veritably gasping at the words “ce mot fatal” (“that fatal word”). Her voice became chilling, no vibrato (did she perhaps have a tear in her eye at this point?); the piano was funereal; the strings sighing in consummate grief. The devastating realisation that the spring could bloom no more, the sun had gone, was unbearably intense, as Garnier and Oneto Bensaid drew out the sounds of the inconsolable as if from another world. The voice of the soprano, impossibly high, unendingly and unerringly sustained, brought the whole tragic story to a hushed end with the words “mort à jamais” – “perished for evermore” – fading a niente, to nothing, to a long, long silence.