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Andrew McGregor with the best new recordings of classical music.

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Building a Library

Flora Willson selects her favourite version of Berlioz's Les nuits d'茅t茅.

Although not quite following in the footsteps of Schumann or Schubert鈥檚 thematically linked song cycles, Berlioz鈥檚 Les nuits d'茅t茅 nevertheless constitutes something of a ground-breaking compilation of song settings of the poetry of the composer鈥檚 Parisian neighbour and fellow romantic, Th茅ophile Gautier, unified more loosely by their authorship and atmospheric depiction.

Penned originally for voice and piano, Berlioz returned to the sequence of six songs in 1843 when he orchestrated the forth song of the series 鈥� Absence 鈥� for his then mistress, Marie Recio. By all accounts, Recio wasn鈥檛 up the task, and thirteen years passed before Berlioz revisited the series and set the second song of the cycle 鈥� Le spectre de la rose - for the mezzo-soprano Anna Bockholtz-Falconi. Present at that performance was the publisher Jakob Rieter-Biedermann who, in turn, compelled the composer to orchestrate the remainder of the cycle, albeit with some transposition, and it鈥檚 thanks to Berlioz鈥檚 subsequent orchestral arrangements that the series has become one of the composer鈥檚 most popular works.

Recommended version:
Jessye Norman (soprano)
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis
Philips 4124932

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