Reviews Alan Blyth reviewed the album on LP in
Gramophone in July 1979. The only negative thing that he could find to say about Frederica von Stade's performance of the opera's title role was that she was a mezzo singing music conceived for a soprano. She was "utterly delightful in her portrayal of vulnerability, in her attention to Massenet's many musical injunctions and her whole-hearted involvement in the part". She was entirely at home in Massenet's "enchanting, light-fingered" style, and expressed every chapter of Cendrillon's story, both sorrowful and joyous, with equal eloquence. Ruth Welting was no less impressive as Cinderella's Fairy Godmother. She sang her glitteringly high music with "not a note misplaced and every one struck truly and accurately". She had been an accomplished Philine in CBS's recording of
Ambroise Thomas's
Mignon – see
Mignon (Antonio de Almeida recording) – but her Fée was even better. The album's other three women were all good too, with Teresa Cahill and Elizabeth Bainbridge "sprightly" as Cendrillon's stepsisters and Jane Berbié bringing out all the comical villainy of their mother. The set's male principals were less successful. As Cendrillon's father, Jules Bastin was "sympathetic and idiomatic" but occasionally unreliable in pitch. Nicolai Gedda's reading of Prince Charming was uncomfortably "strenuous", but was defective more fundamentally simply because of his being a man. His musicianship and command of French could not make up for the fact that Massenet had scored the Prince for a mezzo, not a tenor. The Philharmonia Orchestra played as well as they knew how, and Julius Rudel conducted the score "lovingly, appreciative of both its many delicacies and its romantic heart". The album was the finest in his entire discography. Its audio quality was mostly satisfactory – "a little too recessed" but also "spacious and atmospheric", with neither voices nor instruments allowed undue prominence. The opera itself was "imbued with warmth, ingenuity, and charming colours", a score offering craftsmanship, magic, gossamer, erotic passion, and Massenet "at his most bewitching".
J. B. Steane reviewed the album on CD in
Gramophone in September 1989. Frederica von Stade, he wrote, was a "touchingly beautiful" Cinderella. "The sadness that her voice expresses so well has its place in some of the most exquisite of Massenet's solos, and many of her phrases have a specially memorable loveliness". The role could have been tailor-made for her. Ruth Welting, too, was "accomplished", but both Jules Bastin and Nicolai Gedda were disappointing. Bastin lacked the "finesse and vocal elegance" for Pandolfe, and Gedda was doubly disqualified from singing Prince Charming by his considerable years and his not being the
en travesti mezzo-soprano that Massenet had intended. The album's chorus and orchestra were both excellent, the Ambrosians singing with unimpeachable technique and dramaturgical imagination and the Philharmonia making the most of Massenet's fresh, animated score.
Cendrillon was, Steane promised, "a most delightful web of moonshine choruses, pastoral woodwind, coloratura filigree, wistful sentiment and neat comedy", and readers should not miss the opportunity to hear it for themselves. Richard Fairman included the album in a survey of the Massenet discography in
Gramophone's 2000 Awards issue. "Who could resist Frederica von Stade's ethereal Cinderella", he asked, "as she falls in love at the ball with the words, 'Vous êtes mon Prince Charmant!'?" Unlike his
Gramophone colleagues, he found Ruth Welting's Fairy Godmother "a touch edgy", but he was at one with them in his bemusement that CBS had allotted Prince Charming to the "hard-pressed" tenor of Nicolai Gedda instead of the "elegant female pantomime boy" of Massenet's wishes. He approved Julius Rudel's conducting for resisting the temptation to lapse into an excess of sentimentality. The audio quality of the album he branded disquietingly boomy. The opera itself he thought good in parts, mocking its court scenes as pedestrian but acknowledging the "sprinkling of fairy dust over so much of the rest" as "pure magic". Patrick O'Connor reviewed the album on a reissued CD in
Gramophone in October 2003. Recalling how Frederica von Stade had taken part in several theatrical productions of
Cendrillon in the 1970s and 1980s, he affirmed that "her singing of the title role remains one of the best things she has ever done". Unusually, he had a similarly high opinion of all the album's other principal soloists too. Ruth Welting was "delightful" as the Fairy Godmother, Jules Bastin was "fine" as Pandolfe and even Nicolai Gedda deserved a word of praise. Purists might object to a tenor's usurping the role of a mezzo, but Gedda had sung "with such ardour" that O'Connor was won over. Julius Rudel had conducted with "a nice feeling for Massenet's gentle sensuality". The album's one fault was miserly packaging.
Accolades In September 1989,
Stereo Review named the album as one of its "Best Recordings of the Month". ==Track listing: CD1==