Faure was the first composer—ahead of Debussy, Schoenberg and Sibelius—whose music inspired by Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande was to reach the public, but the stimulus to write it came from London, where Mrs Patrick Campbell felt she needed incidental music for a production of the play in 1898. (Ninety years later in the theatre, it is difficult to imagine a famous actress commissioning a leading composer to furnish a prelude of five minutes or so to each act of a play or an orchestra of the requisite size and sensitivity—and the space—being available to perform it!) The suite as we know it is a re-working by Faure of his pupil Koechlin's original orchestration, except for the ''Sicilienne'' for Act 2 (originally an independent cello piece, and added later to the suite), which remains in Koechlin's scoring. The whole is one of Faure's finest and most poignant creations, perfectly catching the tragic atmosphere of the mysterious and hapless Melisande's story; and it is performed here with passionate intensity—some might even think, at least in ''La mort de Melisande'', with greater weight than seems apt for so fragile a heroine. But the ''Sicilienne'' is played with delicacy, the ''Fileuse'' is not merely pretty (as it is in the finely shaped Marriner reading on Argo) but carries an agitated undertone, and the ''Prelude'' has a spacious eloquence. There is an unfamiliar bonus in the shape of the little song for Melisande written (in English) for the London production but published only in 1937: cleanly and expressively sung by Lorraine Hunt, it proves to be thematically connected with the music for the death scene.
The Pavane—over the year of whose first performance in the choral version the English and French commentators here have been allowed to disagree—is taken rather more - coolly and leisurely than by Marriner, with the chorus more subordinated (not unreasonably, since the main musical interest is instrumental and the inconsequential words were added later). The Bostonians show their command of grace and lightness in the Dolly suite—''Mi-a-ou'' (nothing to do with cats, but little Dolly's attempt to pronounce her brother Raoul's name) with elegance, ''Kitty'' (another misleading title, actually the name of a pet dog!) with an attractive lilt, and ''Le jardin de Dolly'' gently expressive; but those accustomed to the EMI Beecham recording on LP may consider the ''Berceuse'', smooth as it is, on the fast side, and the ''Pas espagnol'' somewhat sedate. Outstanding in this suite is ''Tendresse'', deliciously light in the central canon. Jules Eskin gives an aristocratic reading of the lovely Apres un reve emotional but without exaggerated sentimentality: in the Elegie, however, his first phrase is rather too cut up, and in the impassioned central build-up his tone is rather swamped by the orchestra.'