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.

Leyla Gencer And Grace Bumbry In Unconventional Performance

Grace Bumbry (left) and Leyla Gencer (right) appear backstage during performances of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea at La Scala in 1967. Listen to the performance here.  See some other unique casting choices for this Baroque piece, after the jump.

"L'incoronazione di Poppea (SV 308, The Coronation of Poppaea) is an Italian opera by Claudio Monteverdi, with a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice during the 1643 carnival season. One of the first operas to use historical events and people, it describes how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned empress. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888, after which it became the subject of scholarly attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1960s, the opera has been performed and recorded many times. The original manuscript of the score does not exist; two surviving copies from the 1650s show significant differences from each other, and each differs to some extent from the libretto. How much of the music is actually Monteverdi's, and how much the product of others, is a matter of dispute. None of the existing versions of the libretto, printed or manuscript, can be definitively tied to the first performance at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the precise date of which is unknown. Details of the original cast are few and largely speculative, and there is no record of the opera's initial public reception. Despite these uncertainties, the work is generally accepted as part of the Monteverdi operatic canon, his last and perhaps his greatest work. In a departure from traditional literary morality, it is the adulterous liaison of Poppea and Nerone which triumphs, although this victory is demonstrated by history to have been transitory and hollow. Moreover, in Busenello's version of the story all the major characters are morally compromised. Written when the genre of opera was only a few decades old, the music for L'incoronazione di Poppea has been praised for its originality, its melody, and for its reflection of the human attributes of its characters. The work helped to redefine the boundaries of theatrical music, and established Monteverdi as the leading musical dramatist of his time. [Source]

English National Opera Presents "The Return of Ulysses"

Tom Randle and Pamela Helen Stephen sing Monteverdi
(Photo: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian)

"In the intimacy of the Young Vic, a venue which seems to have a special gift of reining in and sharpening the more sprawlingly proportioned ENO, this had urgent, if doubtless to many irritating, impact. Andrews, an Australian theatre director, achieves shock impact by assaulting the senses, especially the visual. The use of big screens, as here projecting real-time close-ups, is already an operatic cliche which fights with the action and is best ignored. Stillness is an alien notion. Why stand on the spot to deliver your big, sensuous, ornamented aria when you could run, thrust your groin or, in one case, take your knickers off?" [Source]

High praise for the creative team after the jump.