Though Sandrine Piau has made her career as a baroque and classical specialist, in recent years the French soprano has been attempting to move her voice forward into later repertory as well. In this long and ambitious programme consisting largely of 19th- and 20th-century French song, but extending sideways to Liszt, Strauss and Zemlinsky, and with the calm and collected Roger Vignoles as her accompanist, she achieved mixed but intermittently genuine success.

The limitation is partly one of vocal colour. Piau deployed her clean, true soprano with accuracy and musicality. But it lacked the complex range of colours needed to encompass the subtle requirements of her opening Fauré group, or to supply the characteristic charm of the Chausson sequence that closed the first half. Added to this was a suggestion of inhibition towards the top of the voice, where the tone was sometimes shrill rather than opening out freely.

But there were individual songs that went well. She conveyed the magical but elusive delicacy of Chausson's Dans le Forêt du Charme et de l'Enchantement. Fauré's Après un Rêve, however, never really took to the air, while his fatalistic Les Berceaux needed an altogether darker and firmer trajectory to make its proper impact. Curiously, singing two of Liszt's songs in German – Der Fischerknabe and Die Loreley – seemed to allow Piau to connect notes more effectively into evolving lines, and even to savour the text more.

Most recitalists relax in the second half, and here Piau came nearest to suggesting her potential in her native repertoire in Debussy's Ariettes Oubliées and a group by Poulenc, especially the Two Poems by Louis Aragon, where her relish for the vivacity of the words and the exuberance of the music were finally voiced with distinctive personality.