A familiar figure to French audiences, and much admired in these pages as Mélisande with François-Xavier Roth (Harmonia Mundi, 3/22) and for a disc of Ravel’s Prix de Rome cantatas (BIS, 8/22), soprano Vannina Santoni now gives us a rather fine recital with the Lille Orchestra and Jean-Marie Zeitouni. The accompanying booklet notes, anything but modest, make much of her ‘ice and fire’ (as if she were Turandot) and of a passionate nature derived from a dual Corsican/Russian heritage. What she presents us with, in fact, is a portrait gallery of vulnerable yet sensual women, done with a combination of considerable emotional subtlety and great intelligence.

Her tone is a mixture of silk and steel, easy and flexible above the stave, and with a tang in her lower registers that allows her to etch words with pointed intensity. Display is frequently subordinate to expression: you notice, for instance, that she avoids the optional showpiece top D at the close of Thaïs’s Mirror Aria, though the note is well within her grasp elsewhere. This is not primarily an album about coloratura, either, but the Waltz Song from Roméo et Juliette reveals a voice that can move comfortably at speed. There’s an element of knowingness in her characterisation here, too, a tacit and thoughtful reminder that Gounod’s Juliet is not, in fact, quite Shakespeare’s.

She’s often at her best in the French repertory, Massenet in particular. She gets the tricky mix of naivety, worldliness and erotic regret of Manon’s ‘Adieu, notre petite table’ bang on, and is insistently seductive in the big, transgressive Saint-Sulpice scene with Julien Dran’s principled yet ardent Des Grieux. That scene from Thaïs is if anything even more persuasive, the world-weariness, disgust and above all the terror of age, time and mortality all unsparingly realised. There’s much to enjoy in the Italian arias, too. Wally’s ‘Ebben? Ne andrò lontana’ is all reined-in sadness rather than terrible despair, while ‘O mio babbino caro’ sounds really manipulative, and would leave any Schicchi with no emotional room to manoeuvre whatsoever. I prefer a warmer tone in Desdemona’s Willow Song and Ave Maria but there’s no doubting her commitment to it, or the way she conveys the sense of unease and dread that lurks behind it.

As we have come to expect of late, the Lille Orchestra are excellent, though Zeitouni reveals a fondness for spacious speeds, which just occasionally get in the way. The rather undistinguished aria from Alfano’s Risurrezione, with which Santoni opens, would benefit from being moved on a bit more urgently, for instance. But much of the time his approach works: the Saint-Sulpice duet sounds even more flagrant than usual when taken slowly; and the Thaïs aria gains immeasurably in expressive and psychological subtlety from not being bolted. The bits of orchestral padding, all oddly placed near the start, aren’t really necessary, but such minor cavils apart, it’s a fine album, in fact, and a most accomplished and enjoyable recital. Recommended.