The Nightingale is an awkward piece, begun before The Firebird but finished, unwillingly, only after Stravinsky had decisively changed his own direction and that of Western music with The Rite of Spring. He tried to hide the join, he said, but it sticks out like a sore thumb, and one great quality of Conlon's performance is that if anything he emphasizes the miniature opera's straddling of two expressive worlds. In the beautiful Prelude he makes it quite clear that even pre-Firebird Stravinsky already owed almost as much to Debussy as to Rimsky-Korsakov, and with the arrival of the exceptionally beautiful tenor voice of Vsevolod Grivnov as the Fisherman you strongly suspect that this is the recording The Nightingale has been waiting for. Natalie Dessay is lovely in the title-role: no mere twittering air-head coloratura but touchingly expressive in her two songs (a pity, though, that she is placed so close to the microphone: the score says she should be in the orchestra pit, not on stage).
But then Act 2 arrives, at its outset sounding, as Stravinsky said, like the newly installed St Petersburg telephones shrilling, and Conlon is no less responsive to the dissonances and the abrupt motif-juggling of Stravinsky's post-Rite manner. In the music of the Japanese envoys, even, a link between Orthodox chant and the austere rituals of Stravinsky's very late works is obvious. The rest of the cast is fully up to Dessay's and Grivnov's standard; Marie McLaughlin's Russian diction being particularly commendable.
Though entertaining, Renard is, alas, not quite so successful. Grivnov is part of the problem: he just sings beautifully, seemingly unaware of the music's low humour and peasant pungency, but even Conlon doesn't match the composer's own robust vividness. Renard, however, is the fill-up, 17 minutes out of 63, and The Nightingale is pleasure unalloyed.'