This thoroughly recommendable issue is most welcome on CD, where its appreciable attributes can be even more clearly heard. Each singer has been carefully chosen for his or her task, and the contrast in timbres is, for the most part, illuminating. My single reservation concerns Heather Harper whom I now find a little cool for Sheherazade, in spite of the obvious distinction of her phrasing, but then this cycle isn't that well suited to Boulez's talents for stereoscopic precision and minute calculation. The other three singers have hardly been bettered as interpreters of their songs, and Boulez and his BBC and Parisian colleagues play throughout with delicacy combined with pinpoint accuracy. The recordings, made at different times in the 1970s and 1980s, are finely balanced. So I am as enthusiastic about the disc as I was back in 1984, if not more so.

-- Gramophone [4/1987]