[1] The same artists recorded Canteloube's seventeen other Auvergnat songs for the album's predecessor, Frederica von Stade: Chants d'Auvergne, Vol.

"Her limpid, golden voice, admirably handled, draws from each selection its full share of musical beauty and poetic meaning."

And she sang the Canteloube cycle at the beginning of her album - a setting of verses celebrating summer, moonlight and dawn - with "an utterly seductive tonal and stylistic voluptuousness".

Frederica von Stade, she thought, was one of the few singers who sounded at home in Canteloube's arrangements of the folk-songs of the part of France from which he came.

Her first selection of the Chants d'Auvergne had demonstrated "the singer, like the song, to be a perfect fusion of childlike storyteller and sophisticated vocal orchestrator", and her new album did likewise.

"Lou boussu" painted a picture of a hunchback with a "nice balance of melancholy and wry humour" that was reminiscent of Erik Satie.

"The pantheistic ecstasy of Roger Frêne's poetry is realized in steamy, late-romantic settings, with the voice joining in the nocturnal orchestration of the central moonlit panel, and ending in long, clear arcs of hymning melody to Pan".

Collectors tempted by Upshaw's album would "probably find that the consoling romanticism of [von Stade's] tried-and-trusted disc [was] more what they had in mind.

"[6] Frederica von Stade's approach to the Chants d'Auvergne was also critiqued in the 1988 edition of The new Penguin guide to compact discs and cassettes, which judged that "Fine as Frederica von Stade's singing is, she is stylistically and temperamentally far less at home in Canteloube's lovely folksong settings than Victoria de los Angeles,[7] Kiri Te Kanawa[8] or Jill Gomez[9]".