Berlioz's flamboyant opera Benvenuto Cellini is inspired by the life of the legendary Florentine goldsmith and Renaissance figure. Its first performances in Paris during 1838-39 were disastrous as it proved too great a challenge for the musicians of the day. Yet even by Berlioz's high standards it contains music of exceptional inventiveness and beauty. Review Conductor and tenor are the joint heroes of this exhilarating release. This is Davis s second recording of Berlioz s still neglected comic-heroic-romantic masterpiece about the dissolute Roman sculptor who was commissioned by Pope Clement VII to create a statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa the gorgon; the first was for Philips, in the early 1970s, with Nicolai Gedda in the lead. The American tenor Gregory Kunde doesn't have the most immediately appealing timbre, but the high tessitura holds no terrors for him, his sung French is good and, even in his early fifties, he manages to counterfeit the youthful braggadocio of Berli