For a coloratura soprano, the Fire Aria from Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” — high runs and Queen of the Night histrionics — is a perfect showcase for technical wizardry and spunk. So it made sense for Sabine Devieilhe, a rising star in her native France who has won acclaim at the leading opera houses of Europe, to include it in her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on Thursday.

But Ms. Devieilhe’s impetuous and sparkling rendition of that showpiece was only the encore — an afterthought, really — for an evening of delicate, nuanced French art songs. It says something about the confidence of this 33-year-old artist that she felt no need to offer a grab bag highlighting her strengths. The program she assembled, songs by Debussy and his circle, was refined and cohesive. And it still held plenty of opportunities to show off her nimble singing and radiant tone.

Ms. Devieilhe also had a superb partner in the pianist Mathieu Pordoy, whose artistry helped to make this an evening of first-rate chamber music. His finely contoured playing, especially in numbers by Debussy, stood out for its clarity and light pedal use. He revealed details in music that other pianists tend to dissolve in a reverberant haze.

Clarity was also the defining quality of Ms. Devieilhe’s performance, both in her lucid, evenly weighted tone and in her meticulous attention to language. Her program drew heavily on settings of quietly enigmatic texts, whether by Symbolist poets like Paul Verlaine or Sanskrit miniatures filtered through the lenses of Western translators.