A good retrospective anthology of Natalie Dessay's career has been needed ever since she retired from the operatic stage in 2013, and this one fills the bill. In the case of the great soprano, the task is made easier by the fact that most of her solo albums appeared on a single label, Erato, as well as simply by the wealth of material from which compilers can choose. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, from which the bulk of the selections here come, Dessay very rarely did anything wrong. Natalie Dessay à l'Opéra does not ...
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A good retrospective anthology of Natalie Dessay's career has been needed ever since she retired from the operatic stage in 2013, and this one fills the bill. In the case of the great soprano, the task is made easier by the fact that most of her solo albums appeared on a single label, Erato, as well as simply by the wealth of material from which compilers can choose. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, from which the bulk of the selections here come, Dessay very rarely did anything wrong. Natalie Dessay à l'Opéra does not include anything from the recordings-only phase of Dessay's career in the late 2010s when she began to record for Sony Classical, but in that phase, she focused on non-operatic material, and the collection here does its job well. The compilers do well to avoid a chronological approach: instead, devoting one CD each to French, Italian, and German repertory (with encores from Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein). Dessay's versatility was and is part of her brilliance, and she created...
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