A performance that ranks, unquestionably, among the finest to date. Superbly sung, and wonderfully well conducted and played by Alexandre Bloch and his Lille orchestra, this is an interpretation of great beauty and insight. Gens’s dark tone and her ability to fuse sound with sense allow her both to encompass the work’s rapturous lyricism and to map out the psychological subtlety of its depiction of the painful end of an affair.

Chausson’s sensual ‘poem of love and the sea’ could have been tailor-made for Gens, whose onyx-bright soprano is capable of incredible nuance and rides the quasi-Wagnerian orchestral outbursts with ease; the lesser-known Symphony (premiered two years earlier than the song-cycle) also receives a persuasive performance from Bloch and the Lille orchestra, but buy this for the Poème.

Gens’s crystalline sound and immaculate diction are a bonus in these sumptuous settings of poems by Maurice Bouchor...The Symphony is more seldom recorded (or programmed live), but benefits here from Bloch’s idiomatic sense of drama and evocation of atmosphere…Superb.

The composer’s only symphony, in B flat, opens in bright, soaring mood, with a yearning slow movement and an “animé” finale that pulls all the work’s ideas together. Perhaps it doesn’t quite cut it as a masterpiece, but the Lille players and Bloch make a fluent, idiomatic case. The presence of Gens in the gorgeous Poème is the real draw here.

Like the best performers of song, she sings in a straightforward manner, no with pecking, swooping or breathiness. Her diction is crisp and allow us to enjoy the poetry of Maurice Bouchor. A gem of simplicity and elegance. Gens is aided by Alexandre Bloch’s conducting, which is well-paced and never over-indulgent, yet still seductive.