The ground from which they spring is typically French, a mood that rests in part on the colours of the speech and its sounds, in part on a pictorial lyric narrative alternating between inner and outer worlds and absorbing those colours even producing them …? With her sensitive musical partners, who enfold her voice in velvety string sound or frame it with sparse piano writing, Stella Doufexis shows an innate sense of style and craft in giving back to these musical poems the life that is their own. NUITS D’ÉTÉ Stella Doufexis conducts us into the tender darkness of summer nights full of promise, in which hearing is more acute than sight. To a background of subdued orchestral colours, the singer pours out her heartfelt mezzo, summoning up poetical dream images. The consummate instrumentation of Berlioz, Chausson and Ravel is testimony to a continuing tradition: rarely do works of the 19th and 20th centuries blend so harmoniously together.
