Renée Fleming has one of the most sheerly beautiful voices in the world‚ with flawless high notes and an extended lower register‚ and she uses her vocal resources with consummate skill. It may seem ungrateful‚ but I wish she had to work a bit harder for her effects. As it is‚ most of this music is so easy for her that she has ample leisure to ‘interpret’ it‚ moulding phrases with languishing portamento‚ spinning voluptuously smooth lines‚ artfully pointing every nuance. It works very well in Joseph Marx’s four songs‚ which are so enjoyably decadent that they can take any amount of sophistication‚ but Debussy’s Bilitis is robbed of her touching innocence and by half way through the Rachmaninov sequence I longed for unaffected simplicity. In Fauré’s Après un rêve‚ the elision from ‘radieuse’ to the repeated ‘reviens’ is exquisite and the shaded‚ mysterious end is no less fine. But for all her subtleties to register she needs a very slow tempo‚ and the whole song drags. She can point words carefully – the knowing reference to ‘that eternal Clitandre’ in Fauré’s Mandoline is a case in point – but too often her consonants are hardly audible and you scarcely notice when she moves from one language to another. She is best where a song is actually rather hard – the long‚ sustained lines of Strauss’s Ruhe‚ meine Seele! – or where she seems eager to put over a less than familiar piece: the Marx songs and Strauss’s Leises Lied‚ for example. But for the rest‚ despite Thibaudet’s superfine piano playing‚ this is an embarras de richesses: too much voice‚ too much operatic artifice‚ too many lovely but studied sounds.