Mozart: O temerario Arbace... Per quel paterno amplesso, K79

After her critically acclaimed Handel album, Danielle de Niese returns with a feast of Mozart’s most beautiful arias.

Her partnership with Sir Charles Mackerras lends her the wise and authoritative support of one of the great modern heroes of Mozart performance style and practice. It’s an added bonus that in the only duet on this album — “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni — Danielle is reunited after ten years with the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who had also been in the Figaro in which she made her Met debut.

“a voice seductive enough to woo gods as well as mortals… there is nothing restrained about Ms. De Niese’s warmly voluptuous and passionate singing” New York Times

While Kiri Te Kanawa was still preparing for that career-defining debut as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, she made her first Mozart disc under Colin Davis: a collection of sacred music, including the Solemn Vespers, KV 339, with its serene setting of ‘Laudate Dominum’, and Exsultate, jubilate. The Countess became the singer’s calling-card, and she repeated the role immediately in San Francisco and at Glyndebourne. The thwarted Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni followed, again under Davis at Covent Garden, before Kiri took her Countess to the Met in New York in February 1976, and sang her first Fiordiligi in Paris, in a production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. The Paris Opera was also the location of Kiri’s debut as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte in 1977. Her leap into superstardom came when she sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in July 1981. The previous month she had committed her Countess to disc in a classic recording for Decca under Georg Solti.

This collection brings together for the first time on disc, Dame Kiri’s complete Mozart recital discs for Decca (with György Fischer) and Philips (with Sir Colin Davis and Jeffrey Tate). Included too are two arias from her celebrated recording of Le nozze di Figaro with Sir Georg Solti, an aria from her sublime recording of Così fan tutte with James Levine (for Deutsche Grammophon) as well as sacred arias, and sacred music conducted by Neville Marriner and Colin Davis.