Close-Ups

After demonstrating her remarkable versatility in her debut album, Phrases, singer/cellist Héloïse Werner pushes the boat out further in close ups, her virtuoso vocal effects reaching a new level of rapid-fire intensity. Werner’s aim here is to create something of a continuous narrative. To that end, there’s an occasional interlude in the form of an “Echo”, in which the musicians—Werner and a team of six string players—carry out quiet, shadowy improvisations on the music of the previous track or tracks, so enhancing the album’s dreamlike, eventually even nightmarish quality. Werner’s more expressionistic vocal tracks, of which the title track is the virtuosic centrepiece, are reassuringly balanced with several soulful songs, all by women composers. One is Errollyn Wallen’s Tree, the composer’s own arrangement of the original here ending with a beguiling Purcell fantasia-like postlude for strings. The most effective bridge between those reflective songs and Werner’s pyrotechnics, however, is provided by bass player Marianne Schofield’s arrangement of “Sombres lieux”, a song by the obscure 18th-century composer Julie Pinel. Schofield’s tenebrous, downward slithering glissandos suggests the song’s “dark forests”, whose menacing presence intrudes even as Werner sings.