Berlioz • Ravel • Saint-Saëns Berlioz: Les nuits d’été; Ravel: Shéhérazade; Saint-Saëns: Mélodies persanes Marie-Nicole Lemieux (contralto); Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo/Kazuki Yamada Erato 5419765940 68:14 mins
Three sensuous French song cycles from a luxuriantly-voiced singer. Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and Ravel’s Shéhérazade are familiar enough and Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux intersperses these mainstays with a relatively new addition to the repertoire in its orchestral guise. Saint-Saëns’s Mélodies persanes was originally written in 1870 for voice and piano. Two decades later he incorporated the cycle into the dramatic cantata Nuit persane, that re-working providing the basis for this orchestral version.
The Berlioz and Ravel cycles are natural partners, and Lemieux’s beguiling performance sets a formidable benchmark. She ranges from wide-eyed wonder to imperious power in ‘La Splendeur vide’, is mirthfully teasing in ‘La solitaire’ and entices dreamily in ‘La brise’. Shéhérazade also draws on such exoticisms, though Ravel typically creates his own soundworld, bewitchingly inhabitted here by Lemieux.
Kazuki Yamada ensures that the Monte-Carlo players support every nuance, though the recording needlessly places them significantly behind Lemieux. This distance particularly hampers Les nuits d’étés. Given the dramatic fire Lemieux brought to Cassandre in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, she is curiously prosaic in this cycle. The climax of ‘Le Spectre de la rose’, for instance, does not bloom into the spine-tingling radiance of the finest versions. Nonetheless, the voice is never less than magnificent, and the Saint-Saëns and Ravel more than compensate.
Christopher Dingle