This is an account of the Berlioz cycle to be reckoned with. Bernadette Greevy seems to peer into the romantic soul of the work as successfully as any of her many predecessors on disc and conveys the pang of the heart that pesades these unique songs. That shows in the tender, almost mesmeric tone she employs at ''Mon destin fut digne d'envie'' in ''Le spectre de la rose'', where the voice is fined down to a delicate piano, in the urgency and ineffable sense of longing she brings to the section of ''Absence'' beginning ''D'ici labas'', and in the dark, almost menacing tone she rightly uses at that extraordinarily original passage starting ''On dirait'' in ''Au cimitiere'', which fairly shimmers with the proper moonlit atmosphere. I have seldom if ever heard that caught with such sensuousness as by Greevy and Tortelier whose understanding of the cycle adds so much to the success of the interpretation throughout.
All through this is a dark-hued, inward reading, but it never falls into the trap of drawing out tempo to extremes. ''Absence'', at a half a minute quicker than either Baker (EMI) or Crespin (Decca), is finely shaped, Greevy managing the repeat of ''reviens'' quite beautifully with her sustained mezza voce. There are drawbacks. In the first song, ''Villanelle'', the tone often takes on an uncomfortable edge; ''Le spectre de la rose'' suffers &om this to a lesser extent. Maybe these songs were committed to disc earlier than the others before the artist had reached her best form, a pity they weren't remade. Even so, I think it is a version that is even more naturally phrased than Baker's and seriously challenges Crespin's hegemony. It is certainly to be preferred to those made by more illustrious singers in the 1980s, though not to Sir Colin Davis's mixed voiced version from the 1970s (Philips (CD) 416 961-2PH, 9/88) or to van Dam's version of the piano edition (reviewed on page 1366).
Almost half the record is taken up with Duparc's orchestral versions of his own songs. These form an entirely apt pendant to the Berlioz for in a sense they carry forward the same tradition, Duparc adding his own particular kind of romanticism to the genre. Predictably, Greevy and Tortelier are just as at home here. The mezzo arrestingly contrasts the sad reflections of Chanson triste with the wild fury, then louring calm of Le manoir de Rosemonde. She doesn't linger too lovingly over the wonderful L'invitation au voyage, finds the right sorrowing for the Wagnerian Soupir, though here, as occasionally elsewhere, the orchestra are too prominent. Indeed, this touches on my overriding resewation about this otherwise recommendable CD. The voice seems too often caught in a strange acoustic in the mid distance (I had the same reaction from two different sets of loudspeakers). That doesn't make it easy for the singer to achieve an intimate rapport with her audience and it sometimes makes her diction unclear, as in Phidyle: the climactic phrases here also show some wear on Greevy's lovely voice. But I hope these adverse remarks won't stop you hearing performances that so sensitively catch the mood of all these marvellous melodies.'