Title: Crespin rules still!
Product review: Régine Crespin's recording of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été is quite simply still - after forty-plus years - the finest I've ever heard, and that includes some fifteen different recordings. Add her immaculately clear enunciation of the verbal text to the gorgeous vocal qualities of those long-held vowels, and her fantastically acute articulation and phrasing of Berlioz's musical re-imagining of Gautier poems, coupled with deeply sensitive accompaniment by Ernest Ansermet and his Suisse Romande orchestra, and we really have no need for other recordings (not that I don't welcome them, as long as they don't make Mme Crespin's go out of print). This, as Gramophone magazine recognized upon original release, is one of the really great triumphs of musical recordings, an immediate and lasting classic. You owe it to yourself to get to know this recording. The Ravel Shérézade, while a lesser composition, is of comparable performance and recording quality.
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