Following their critically acclaimed discs of Berlioz cantatas (8555810) and L’Enfance du Christ (8553650 (2CD)), the Orchestre National de Lille and Jean-Claude Casadesus return to Naxos and to Berlioz this month with a programme pairing two of the most ravishing nineteenth-century French song-cycles with Dukas’ finest orchestral work. Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, set to the impassioned love poems of his friend and fellow critic, Théophile Gautier, was the first ever French song-cycle and shows the composer at the pinnacle of his powers of orchestration. Intended to be sung by different voices, here the cycle receives a wonderfully idiomatic performance from soprano Elsa Maurus, who has recently appeared at La Scala Milan. Dukas’ La péri is a dance poem based on the old Persian legend of King Isender and the péri (a beautiful female fallen angel) and rounding off the programme is Chausson’s luxuriantly orchestrated and at times Wagnerian Poème de l’amour et de la mer, set to texts by Maurice Bouchor on the transient nature of love.`This music is among Berlioz’s most tender and restrained, disquieting as well as beguiling. Casadesus conducts a warm performance from the Orchèstre National de Lille. … Though recorded in studio conditions, this has an air of real performance about it.´ The Sunday Times on 8553650 - `Casadesus’ direction is totally idiomatic. He draws not just from the excellent line-up of soloists but from the whole ensemble a performance that in its urgency leads you magnetically through the plot.´ The Guardian (Classical CD of the Week) on 8660072. - `In giving their all [the soloists] are merely taking a cue from Berlioz’s orchestra which, under Casadesus’s firm direction, miraculously already sounds like the Berlioz we know.´ The Gramophone on 8555810