Natalie Dessay

The mid-price collection presents some of the most important and admired recordings of the EMI Classics and Virgin Classics catalogue which make EMI 'The Home of Opera'. These performances of Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex were recorded in 1999 at All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak, London.

In five spectacular coloratura scenes from the 19th and 20th centuries, Natalie Dessay goes beyond the edge of sanity and touches the limits of vocal virtuosity.

“You’d be mad to miss it” proclaimed the striking poster for the opening poduction of the 2007-2008 season at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. The image on the poster was of French soprano Natalie Dessay, waif-like and wild-eyed, in a wedding dress and in character as Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, opera’s quintessential mad heroine.

This collection features Dessay in five scenes of coloratura madness – or near-madness -- by two Italian composers, two French composers, and one (satirising) American.

Soprano characters who go insane are quite a feature of 19th-century opera, providing composers with an opportunity to write virtuosic and often adventurous music to express the wanderings of the poor heroine’s mind.

Here, Dessay sings the French version of the Bride of Lammermoor’s famous post-nuptial scene. Lucie di Lammermoor was performed in Paris in 1839, four years after the opera’s Italian premiere in Naples. Dessay first sang the Italian version on stage in Chicago in 2004. As Opera News wrote: “The French coloratura … was in superb form, her instantly recognizable timbre focused and delivered with just enough bite to keep things interesting. The voice acquires a distinctive shimmer above the staff, and it coursed through the elaborate filigree with precision and spontaneity, exhibiting liquid trills and a lovely diminuendo. Dramatically, the soprano created a tightly wound, febrile presence at her first entrance, a fragile slip of a girl overwhelmed by the dominating men around her. … The cadenza was quite heartrending … ‘Spargi d’amaro pianto’ was capped with a fully voiced, gleaming interpolation in alt, bringing a highly individual performance to a triumphant conclusion.”

Donizetti’s heroine is driven to murder, but Elvira, the bride-to-be at the centre of Bellin’s I puritani, premiered in Paris in 1835, is no particular danger to anyone; her insanity is only temporary and the opera ends happily. Her mad scene, a more conventional operatic construction than Lucia’s, features one of Bellini’s loveliest fine-spun melodies.

Nor is madness terminal in Meyerbeer’s Dinorah (1859), set in rural Brittany and notable for featuring a (silent) supporting role for a pet goat. The heroine’s delicious ‘Ombre légère’ is the opera’s greatest hit and here Dessay performs the extraordinary feat of singing a stratospheric A flat above top C.

Far more tragic in its implications is the mad scene of Ophélie from Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet (1868), described by London’s Observer as “a fiendish set-piece which … Natalie Dessay carries off with wondrous aplomb”. Poor Ophelia strays through a number of contrasting sections before a vertiginous suicidal finale. Dessay has performed Ophélie in London, Barcelona (available on an EMI Classics DVD) and Toulouse; she returns to the role in Spring 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera.

Fast-forwarding nearly 100 years Dessay takes on Cunégonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, based on Voltaire’s satirical novel and first staged on Broadway in 1956. This is not quite a mad scene: it starts off with Cunégonde bemoaning her descent into vice, but she cheers up at thoughts of her life of luxury, her near-hysterical coloratura reflecting the bubbles in her champagne and the sparkle of her jewels. Recorded live at the EMI centenary concert at Glyndebourne, this performance was welcomed by Gramophone as an “hilarious performance, with Dessay dazzling in the lightest of coloratura”.

The brand new series celebrates EMI - The Home of Opera with Natalie Dessay's recording of Lucie de Lammermoor with Roberto Alagna and Ludovic Tézier. Includes complete libretto and synopsis on a bonus CD ROM.

“It seems that, in the years around 1720, when people went to the opera to hear a castrato idol or an adored soprano, they would play cards, pay court to their neighbours and savour sorbets during the recitatives – even during the so-called arias of action, which they enjoyed less than the ornamented reprises of the showpiece arias. With this intractable and hedonistic audience in mind (so different from people like us, of course), thirteen star singers came together to concoct this festive piece, constructed and presented in three acts like a true dramma per musica, but with no explicit story and no concrete characters: in other words, an imaginary opera formed of passion and music.” Ivan A. Alexandre

This album marks the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death with creativity, erudition and maybe a touch of audacity. Far more than a compilation album, it selects individual numbers from 11 operas and two oratorios by Handel and reassembles them in a sequence that respects the potent formula elaborated in the composer’s 38 works for the operatic stage.

While there is no specific narrative, the listener will be drawn in by the dramatic logic of a balanced succession of numbers, including some ‘greatest hits.

Initially designed to be a play with music, it quickly became apparent to Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal that what was intended as an after-dinner entertainment would require an opera company to perform it. So, in 1916, a 30-minute ‘divertissement’ became a 90-minute opera, with a newly composed prologue. Set in the house of ‘the richest man in Vienna’, it concerns the struggles of a young composer to arrange a performance of his new opera for the guests his master has invited to the house.

His opera is about Ariadne on the island of Naxos, and all the backstage chaos and bitching and scratching among performers and the domestic staff is wonderfully portrayed by Strauss. The mutual hostility between the Major-Domo and the composer is exquisite. The prologue is followed by the opera proper, and the marvel of the orchestration is especially notable – with just 36 players playing some of Strauss’s most sumptuous music.

‘Any opera house in the world would think themselves fortunate to assemble this cast … A landmark in the history of the gramophone … this really does triumph over them all.’ Gramophone

This ravishing selection of arias and duets is drawn from some of Handel’s finest vocal works, among them the operas Xerxes (source of the famous ‘Largo’), Ariodante, with its gripping ‘Scherza, infida’, and, perhaps his most popular works for the stage, Giulio Cesare and Alcina.

The generously-filled discs (two CDs for the price of one) also include the complete cantata Splenda l’alba in oriente and excerpts the dramatic cantata Armida abbandonata, the English ode L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and the exquisite Neapolitan serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo.

An international cast of outstanding Handelians includes Philippe Jaroussky, Natalie Dessay, David Daniels, Véronique Gens, Ian Bostridge, Joyce DiDonato, Stephanie Blythe, Janet Baker, Vivica Genaux, Gérard Lesne, James Bowman..

Having steadfastly built her reputation as a major performer in the pyrotechnic coloratura roles, Natalie Dessay is at a turning point in her career and is exploring, to great international recognition, the more “lyrical roles”, such as Amina, one of the great Bellini heroines.

After her immense success as Lucia in Paris in the Autumn 2006 under the direction of Evelino Pidò, Natalie Dessay and the Italian maestro furthered their musical collaboration with a concert version of Bellini’s La sonnambula first at Lyon and later in Paris. The recording was made in Lyon on the event of these performances.

Natalie Dessay stars in this critical edition of Bellini’s Sonnambula, which was produced by Alessandro Roccatagliati and Luca Zoppelli. It has restored two major parts of Elvino’s role (the cavatina “Prendi: l’anel ti dono” and the beautiful duettino between Amina and Elvino “Vedi o madre”) to their original tessitura. This edition was first produced in August 2004 in Santa Fe, precisely with Natalie Dessay in the title role under the direction of Evelino Pidò.

Forumopera.com states: “The rest of the cast calls for congratulations: it is of a remarkable level.” Indeed it introduces a young 25 year-old Italian tenor, Francesco Meli, at the threshold of a very promising career, and gathers several talents of the opera world such as Jaël Azzaretti and Sara Miingardo, Carlo Colombari and Paul Gay.

The complete recording was released in November 2007