Rio-Paris Natalie Dessay

• 1 Les eaux de mars 03:27
• 2 Catende 06:11
• 3 Manha de carnaval - Orfeu Negro 04:26
• 4 Etude No. 8 in C-Sharp Minor 02:57
• 5 Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 04:53
• 6 Modinha 01:51
• 7 Prelude No. 2 in E Major 03:00
• 8 Les Mères, Op. 45 02:59
• 9 L'oiseau blessé d'une flèche, Op. 10 02:26
• 10 Suite popular brasileira: No. 4 Gavotta-Choro 05:32
• 11 Agua e vinho 04:25
• 12 Chega de saudade 04:28
• 13 A Felicidade 03:28
• 14 Samba em preludio 04:08
• 15 Choro lento - retrato brasileiro 03:29
• 16 Desafinado 04:52
• 17 Bidonville - Consolação 06:17
• Total Runtime 01:08:49

Info for Rio-Paris

Natalie Dessay, further exploring musical territories beyond opera and classical song, visits Rio de Janeiro, the city that will host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. She is joined by guitarist Liat Cohen and two actress-singers, Agnès Jaoui and Helena Noguerra, in this encounter between France and Brazil.

Rio de Janeiro has long been famed for its glamour and vibrancy, but in Summer 2014 the eyes of the world will be fixed upon the bay-side city beneath the Sugar Loaf Mountain – and specifically on its Maracanã Stadium, the venue for the final of the FIFA World Cup. Over the following two years, Rio’s profile will continue to remain high as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in 2016.

As the former capital of Brazil (until the foundation of Brasilia in 1960), and as the most populous city in this huge, multicultural country, Rio has a rich musical tradition. It was the birthplace of the country’s most famous classical composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), who spent several years in Paris in the 1920s, while in the late 1950s and 60s it became inextricably associated with the bossa nova, the subtle, haunting offspring of the insistent samba that became an international force in popular music. The genre was created by singer and guitarist João Gilberto (b.1931) in collaboration with singer and pianist Antônio Carlos (Tom) Jobim, who composed the ubiquitous ‘Girl from Ipanema’. (Ipanema is a chic district of Rio with a beach almost as famous as Copacabana.)

Natalie Dessay’s first album of popular songs – recorded with composer-pianist Michel Legrand – was released in late 2013. The Times said: “Treat yourself or a needy Francophile to this delicious if unlikely combination ... [Dessay] is breathy, sexy, passionate and wonderfully virtuosic.” For Rio-Paris she is joined by three female performers, all renowned in France, who have connections with Portuguese and/or Brazilian culture: Liat Cohen, the French-trained Israeli classical guitarist, who has made something of a speciality of the music of Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, whose origins lie in Spain and Portugal; the French actress, screenwriter and singer Agnès Jaoui, who was born to a Sephardi family in Tunisia, and who is the adoptive mother of two Brazilian children and who has recorded two albums of songs in Spanish and Portuguese, Canta and Dans mon pays, and Helena Noguerra, a sultry Belgian-born singer and actress of Portuguese descent.

The album features music by Villa-Lobos, Gilberto and Jobim, and by: Egberto Amin Gismonti (b. 1947 in Rio de Janeiro), a composer, guitarist and pianist who studied in Paris with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger, and whose other musical influences include Jimi Hendrix; guitarist Baden Powell de Aquino (1937- 2000) – named after the founder of the scouting movement and normally known simply as Baden Powell; the poet and bossa nova composer Marcus Vinicius da Cruz e Mello Moraes (1913-1980), generally known simply as Vinicius de Moraes; the Paraguayan guitarist and composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré (1885-1944), and Waldir Azevedo (1923-1980) – another native Carioca – who played the ukelele-like cavaquinho and who specialized in choro, an intricate instrumental genre that originated in Rio in the 19th century.

Natalie Dessay, vocals
Agnès Jaoui, vocals
Helena Noguerra, vocals
Liat Cohen, guitar

Natalie Dessay
is one the stars of today’s operatic world, thrilling audiences as both a singer and an actress.

Now an admired interpreter of bel canto and lyric heroines such as Violetta (La traviata), Lucia di Lammermoor, Marie (La Fille du régiment), Amina (La sonnambula), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Manon, Juliette, Ophélie (Hamlet) and Cleopatra (Giulio Cesare), Dessay originally made her reputation with showpiece coloratura roles such as Offenbach’s Olympia, Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Strauss’ Zerbinetta.

Born in Lyons in 1965, Natalie Dessay grew up in Bordeaux. She first dreamed of becoming a dancer, but later studied acting and singing at the Bordeaux Conservatoire. She progressed with extraordinary rapidity, completing five years’ worth of study in just one year and graduating with First Prize at the age of twenty. In 1989, after a brief period in the chorus of the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, she entered France’s first Concours des Voix nouvelles and won second prize. This led Dessay to further studies at the Paris Opéra and also brought her to the attention of the agent Thérèse Cédelle – still her agent today – and to her first major engagements as a soloist.

In 1992 she sang her first Olympia in Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann at Paris’s Opéra Bastille in a staging by Roman Polanski. The next year she was invited to the Vienna Staatsoper to sing Blondchen (Die Entführung aus dem Serail). In 1993 she was Olympia in the opening production for the rebuilt Opéra de Lyon and by 2001 she had performed the role in eight different stagings of Hoffmann, including her debut appearance at La Scala. The 1990s also brought the Queen of the Night at Aix-en-Provence, Ophélie (Hamlet) in Geneva (she also sang the role at London’s Royal Opera House and at Barceona’s Liceo in 2003, where the production was filmed for DVD), Aminta (Die schweigsame Frau) in Vienna, Fiakermilli (Arabella) for her debut at the New York Met, which was soon followed by Olympia and Zerbinetta, Lakmé at Paris’ Opéra Comique (she recorded the role for EMI Classics with Michel Plasson), Eurydice in Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers in Lyons (also recorded for EMI Classics), and, in Paris, Morgana in Handel’s Alcina and the title role in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol (also to be seen on DVD). Conductors for these appearances included Pierre Boulez, James Levine, James Conlon, William Christie and Marc Minkowski.

In 2001 the soprano’s career entered a new phase when she realised a long-held ambition to perform Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a role she subsequently sang in 2004 in Chicago, in 2006 at the Bastille in a powerful staging by Andrei Serban, and in a new production for the opening of the New York Metropolitan’s 2007-8 season on 24th September 2007, which was broadcast on a giant screens at Lincoln Centre and Times Square. She also recorded the French version of the opera. More Donizetti, La Fille du régiment, provided a triumph for her in 2007 in Laurent Pelly’s witty staging in London, Vienna and New York. The British performances led to a Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera for Dessay, and to a DVD-release which has proved an international bestseller.

In 2008 Natalie Dessay returned to the Metropolitan for revivals of Lucia and of La Fille du régiment, which was broadcast live in high definition to hundreds of cinemas around the world. In the autumn of the same year she triumphed as Manon (a role she first sang in Geneva in 2004) at Chicago Lyric Opera opposite Jonas Kaufmann as Des Grieux; this was in David McVicar’s production of Massenet’s opera, also staged in Barcelona, where it was recorded for DVD with Rolando Villazón as Des Grieux.

January 2009 brought Natalie Dessay’s first Mélisande at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, directed by Laurent Pelly (a DVD of this Pelléas et Mélisande was released in November 2009). More firsts followed in 2009 with Violetta in the summer in Santa Fe and Musetta at the Opéra de Paris in the autumn. In 2010, Paris mounted a new production of La Sonnambula for Dessay, six years after her first appearances as Bellini’s heroine in Santa Fe; her interpretation of Amina was recorded during concert performances in Lyon in November 2006 and released in autumn 2007. In 2009 Dessay assumed the role of Amina again, this time in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. Another new production of La sonnambula, seen in both Paris and Vienna, followed in 2010. 2011 brought her first Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, again at the Opéra de Paris, in a staging conducted by Laurent Pelly and conducted by Dessay’s frequent colleague Emmanuelle Haim. In summer 2011, the Aix-en-Provence Festival brought Dessay in a new production of La traviata.

Natalie Dessay signed her first exclusive contract with EMI Classics in 1994 and, in addition to the recordings already mentioned, her catalogue includes discs of Mozart (a collection of arias and his Mass in C minor), songs and arias by Strauss, works by Monteverdi Bach and Handel (including a disc of arias from Giulio Cesare), all conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm, and collections of Italian arias, French arias and vocalises. Her 2-CD and DVD compilations Le Miracle d’une voix, released in 2006, have proved an enormous success, selling over 250,000 copies and showcasing her range of achievement as an artist.

Booklet for Rio-Paris