Warner Classics Capitalizes On Natalie Dessay Discography

As Natalie Dessay makes the decision to exit the opera stage forever, her record label searches the archives to release a compilation pulled from her career over the last 15 years of singing Bach, Händel, Rameau, and Monteverdi with Emmanuelle Haïm and William Christie. The 2-CD set also comes with a DVD featuring Ms. Dessay in Händel's Alcina. The release is set for November 6. You can pre-order your copy by clicking here. See the complete track list after the jump.

World Premiere of Rameau's Revised "Dardanus" by EOC

Cast member Svetli Chaumie

The European Opera Centre will present the world premiere performance of Jean-Philippe Rameau's rarely heard 18th century opera Dardanus on July 20 (Limerick, Ireland) & 22 (Liverpool, England). "The musicians are French, handpicked and each of them is specific to their basse de viole, clavecin, hautbois and hautes-contre de violin. There’s a list of 28 instruments in all..." The opera is performed on occasion around the world, but generally in its first version given in Paris in 1739 at the Académie Royal de Musique. This production presents the revised edition by Rameau five years after the premiere, which has never been revived in modern times.

"This new edition – commissioned by the European Opera Centre from the French musicologist, Dr Gilles Rico - is based on the 1744 version of the opera. It incorporates the numerous emendations made by Rameau during the 1744 and 1760 runs of the opera to tighten the dramatic grip and enlarge the emotional range of musical expression. Using autograph and non-autograph eighteenth-century manuscript and printed sources, it makes available for the first time to modern audiences some of the most beautiful and inspired musical passages of an opera which epitomizes the evolution of French opera in the eighteenth century from a court entertainment - constrained by the grand display of technical prowess and a pronounced taste for extraordinary stories - to a more intimate and more humanistic drama."

[Watch an excerpt of Christiane Eda-Pierre as Vénus singing "Marlgre le Dieu Des Mers" in a 1980 production of Dardanus at the Théâtre National de Paris with conductor Raymond Leppard]

Trisha Brown Revives Rameau Opera Through Dance

"The world premiere is Les Yeux et l'âme (The eyes and the soul), a dance suite distilled from her recent evening-length work, Pygmalion. Brown's staging of the 1748 opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau debuted last June in Amsterdam. Les Yeux will be performed to recorded extracts from the opera. In a clip from L'Amour au théâtre (set to sections of another Rameau opera, Hippolyte et Aricie), two couples are clearly engaged in flirty, sensual explorations that, however intricate they get, couldn't be more transparent or intelligible. 'In my operas, in contrast to my choreography, even though I rely on abstract movement, I also respect characterization,' she wrote. 'I proceed with painstaking logic; an expansive embrace of improvisation, spontaneity, as well as a regard for the body's natural capabilities, the natural pathways of its movement.' She adds: 'My movement vocabulary and choreographic structures are imbued with imagery responsive to the libretto and to the emotional content of the libretto and music.'" Trisha Brown Dance Company performs at University of Washington's Meany Hall March 31-April 2, 2011. [Source]