Soprano Sabine Devieilhe has a silvery voice that blooms unexpectedly into a rich vibrato at phrase ends. One might object to that in a program of French songs like this one, it doesn't vary much in texts that run from the purely Romantic to proto-surrealist takes on the given theme of love. Nevertheless, the voice is distinctive enough that many pieces will linger in the listener's thoughts, and the Siemens-Villa studio sound from Erato's engineers brightens her to brilliance. Best of all is the group of six Ariettes oubli ...
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Soprano Sabine Devieilhe has a silvery voice that blooms unexpectedly into a rich vibrato at phrase ends. One might object to that in a program of French songs like this one, it doesn't vary much in texts that run from the purely Romantic to proto-surrealist takes on the given theme of love. Nevertheless, the voice is distinctive enough that many pieces will linger in the listener's thoughts, and the Siemens-Villa studio sound from Erato's engineers brightens her to brilliance. Best of all is the group of six Ariettes oubliées of Debussy in the second half of the program. These are early Debussy songs, but their oblique restraint and their state-of-the-art texts by Paul Verlaine mark them unmistakably as products of the mature composer. Here Devieilhe has room to relax her voice and wrap it around lines that seem never to go quite where one thinks they will. She, likewise, does well with the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques of Ravel, entering into the songs' simplicity. Elsewhere are other songs by...
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