Both of Berg's sets of orchestral songs ideally need operatic amplitude combined with a Lieder-singer's subtlety and responsiveness to words. Jessye Norman, whose sumptuous voice can, as I once heard her say, ''move only so fast'', might not seem the obvious casting, but in fact she succeeds pretty well ideally. Being able to 'move only so fast' means, I think, that the voice takes a moment or two to change gear from full, orchestra-riding splendour to a lightly touched pianissimo, but there are only occasional signs here even of that restriction. When Berg asks, in the first of the Fruhe Lieder, for a difficult fining-down to mezza voce near the top of the voice (when the text speaks of ''a breath of breeze from a distant heath'' breaking the silence), that is precisely what Norman provides. There is room for more voice in the sometimes more densely scored Altenberg Lieder, but although I could have done with a closer approximation of the almost impossible ppp high A towards the end of the second song she manages the even trickier demands of the third (which rarely rises above p and sinks to a low A maked ''toneless'') quite admirably. Of course when an exciting opening-out of tone is needed, or a descent into the mezzo register she is in her element, but it's a sign of how well she has judged the scale of these pieces that when she moves to the songs with piano accompaniment there's no sense of her switching to a more intimate manner. The care for words and for the delicacy of touch where needed are consistent throughout and this enables her to characterize each song beautifully.
What a consistent voice it is, by the way. The Altenberg Lieder were recorded over ten years ago, the songs with piano last autumn, but you would hardly guess. Once or twice in these latter I felt that Norman would have been a shade more comfortable in a higher key; at the end of Vielgeliebte schone Frau I thought I noticed her, quite permissably, fining-down the last note of the song by turning her head away from the microphone. Otherwise nothing but pleasure and gratitude that these songs, so obviously written with a really beautiful voice in mind, have had such subtlety as well as beauty lavished on them. Boulez ensures that the orchestral textures are no less refined; he could have phrased them more lushly, but would have lost some of Norman's fine detail in the process. Ann Schein is a responsive partner in the songs with piano and the recordings are good. The programme isn't especially good value of course; a new version of the concert aria Der Wein would have been the obvious choice but having waited ten years to compile the present disc you can understand Sony not wanting to put off its issue any longer. '