Britten completed but didn't orchestrate the songs - 'Phrase', 'Aube' and 'À une raison'; Matthews matches them finely to the style of Illuminations. While the cycle is often associated with pears and other tenors… Piau is a worthy successor, cooler and less emotive than Pears, perhaps less nuanced but more naturally phrased, and simply more beautiful.

Sandrine Piau makes a superb soloist – impeccable French, or course, but she brings so much more to bear with her cool, clear sound, and often seriously beautiful phrasing, floating ethereally to the centre of Rimbaud’s poetry...Buy this for Les Illuminations, but savour it for so many new discoveries.

All the performances are superb. Sandrine Piau's stylish and imaginative interpretation of Les illuminations is one of the best soprano versions on disc, in fact. Michael Collins's easy virtuosity in the Clarinet Concerto is a joy. And throughout, Thomas Zehetmair elicits razor-sharp, sensitively shaped playing from the Northern Sinfonia. In short, this is one of the most important Britten recordings in many a year.

this performance, taken from a Northern Sinfonia concert with Sandrine Piau as the delightfully idiomatic soloist, includes as an appendix three further Rimbaud settings that ­Britten omitted from the final cycle and left in piano score, which have been ­orchestrated by Colin Matthews...lots of little ­insights into Britten's musical world.