Skip to main content

Classical home listening: Natalie Dessay; Leo Chadburn; the House of Bedlam and Birdgirl

The great French soprano takes her leave of the stage with a glittering three-disc retrospective. Elsewhere, moths, musk and birdsong

• The French singer and actor Natalie Dessay has stepped away from the operatic stage, alas, but stands out as one of the greatest coloratura sopranos of recent times, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. À l’opéra (Erato) is a three-CD set from across her career, with different companies from the Royal Opera House to Les Arts Florissants to Le Concert d’Astrée. One disc is of French repertoire (Gounod, Meyerbeer, Offenbach), one Italian (Bellini, Verdi, Donizetti) and the last is the rest: including Mozart, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky.

Distinguished by a bright, gleaming tone, fiery energy, nimble ornamentation and crisp, verbal dexterity, Dessay excels especially in the three Cleopatra arias from Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Her Chanson d’Olympia from Les contes d’Hoffmann, recorded in 1996, remains a showstopper, as does Caro nome from Rigoletto. The final track is Cunegonde’s Glitter and Be Gay from Bernstein’s Candide. If there’s a sadness in having to accept Dessay’s absence from the stage, her sparkling humour, captured here, more than compensates.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31lcybs
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more