In 1958 Poulenc composed La voix humaine, a one-act opera for soprano and orchestra, based on the monodrama of the same name, written for the Comédie-Française by his friend Jean Cocteau. In this staging of the end of an amorous relationship, we hear only the woman’s side of a final telephone conversation with the man who has abandoned her. The orchestra in this innovative work is used not only to unify the composition, but also to reveal what the voice, laid bare by a moving parlé-chanté style, does not say. Fiançailles pour rire and Chemins de l’amour, usually for voice and piano, but presented here in an orchestrated version by one of our finest conductors, Frédéric Chaslin, completes this eloquent rendition of works of a bittersweetness that Poulenc transcends like no other.

Documenting more than a hundred years of Italian operatic music in France, Benjamin Bernheim’s new album Boulevard des Italiens. Music stretching from Spontini’s La Vestale to Mascagni’s Amica – all sung in French – receives gold-star treatment from Bernheim, a tenor ideally placed to sing this repertoire in his native language. As he explains, “The aim was really to show the history of the French language in opera houses in Paris by way of these Italian composers who brought their pieces there. With the Opéra Garnier at one end, and the Opéra-Comique at the other, the Boulevard des Italiens is where it all happened.”

On album of songs covering over a hundred years of French mélodie, from Reynaldo Hahn to the present day. It includes classics of the genre (Debussy's Nuit d'étoiles, Poulenc's Les chemins de l'amour), but also very recent compositions, in the form of two song cycles by Frédéric Chaslin. Chansons pour elle (to poems by Jean Cocteau) and Nudités (texts by Alain Duault) are imaginative works, free in their expression. Music of today meets music of yesterday and the result is both subtle and poetic.

From well-loved arias to new discoveries, this recording journeys through over a century of opera, with transcriptions for cello and orchestra stretching from Mozart to Puccini and including Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Offenbach. The curtain goes up on some of Ophélie Gaillard’s favourite pieces, which explore human passions through the voice of the cello, that most human of instruments.