Donizetti: Il dolce suono mi colpì di sua voce! … Spargi d'amaro pianto (from Lucia di Lammermoor) (Mad Scene)

When Joan Sutherland died, many music critics commented on the quality of her voice in her early performances. The concert performances recorded here gave her the opportunity to deliver glorious singing without too many distractions. She was also able to collaborate with artists who she would not encounter in the opera house, such as Dennis Brain, heard here.

Her legendary 1959 debut operatic recital for Decca, released on a single CD for the first time.

Bonus tracks taken from the 1950s L’Oiseau Lyre Handel recording featuring the Philomusica London and Anthony Lewis.

Newly re-mastered.

In tribute to one of Decca’s very greatest artists, a 2-for-1 double jewel-case version of Dame Joan Sutherland’s classic ‘The Voice of the Century’ 2-disc compendium is now available for release. The track contents are identical those of the original hardback version of ‘The Voice of the Century’ (4757981), and include arias from Lucia di Lammermoor, La sonnambula, Norma, Lakmé, Semiramide, La Fille du Régiment, Turandot, and many more.

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 forthcoming season marks the 10th anniversary of Anna Netrebko’s debut with the Metropolitan Opera, New York. The new album celebrates this milestone by bringing together her greatest MET moments throughout the past 10 seasons - performances never before issued on record and most never commercially released on any format.

Anna Netrebko's first operatic album sold more than 300,000 units, the second, Sempre libera, more than 400,000, while her live recording of Verdi's La Traviata has sold in excess of 350,000 on CD alone. This new album, capturing the thrill of her greatest performances on one of the world's most iconic stages, will be a major event for hundreds of thousands of fans who have followed her career in the opera house, on radio, on CD, on DVD and in cinemas worldwide.

Over the past decade, The Met has played host to many of the Russian soprano’s greatest triumphs, from Prokofiev’s War and Peace in 2002 to her most recent appearance, in 2010, as Adina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale. The album also includes virtuoso arias from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Bellini's I Puritani, Verdi's Rigoletto, Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Puccini's La Bohème.

The selections - including performances with tenors Roberto Alagna, Joseph Calleja and Juan Diego Flórez - demonstrate Anna Netrebko's remarkable vocal range and dramatic imagination. All recorded live, they are infused with her unique vocal magnetism and irresistible on-stage charisma.