Born in Tallinn in 1962, Paavo Järvi is renowned for his dynamic interpretations and innovative programming. He has held prominent positions with leading orchestras, including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, or the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich more recently. Paavo Järvi's approach combines technical precision with expressive depth, making him a favourite among musicians and audiences alike.

Celebrating 80 years of vigorous artistic life with Brahms’ expansive and consoling mass for the dead, Ein deutsches Requiem, the hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra) under its Chief Conductor Paavo Järvi, is joined by soprano Natalie Dessay, baritone Ludovic Tézier and the Swedish Radio Choir in an interpretation described as “exemplary” by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

This selection of scenes and arias, all very familiar items, is distinguished by the imaginative accompaniments under Evelino Pidò. …here we have one of the great opera personalities of our time - it's a lovely voice, used with a formidable technique.

Handel wrote the secular oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The triumph of Time and of Enlightenment) to the text of one of his patrons, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, in Rome in 1707. The libretto, which doesn't stand up to close logical scrutiny, centers on Beauty, who must choose between self-indulgent Pleasure and the austerity of allegiance to Time and Enlightenment. Needless to say, any patron entering the theater for the performance, having noted the title on the playbill, would have no doubt about the outcome of the struggle, so dramatic suspense cannot have been one of the inducements for an eighteenth century audience. The rewards, however, are real, most notably Handel's remarkably fertile inventiveness and musical ingenuity, which justified sitting through a two-and-a-half-hour performance that was guaranteed to be a dramatic non-starter. Handel keeps recitatives to a minimum, and the oratorio is rich in musical substance and variety.

Warner Classics & Erato DVD catalogue already contains several characteristically stylish and imaginative productions by the French opera director Laurent Pelly: Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Massenet’s Cendrillon, Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Handel’s Giulio Cesare. The last three all star Natalie Dessay, and now she and Pelly are reunited once again, this time for Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, staged at Barcelona’s Liceu opera house in early 2013.

David McVicar's production of Manon takes a more than usually harsh view of the story…Here, everything and everybody is for sale… It is thrilling, sometimes even slightly shocking, and throughout the direction of the cast is faultless: every scene bears re-viewing for the amount of detail and dramatic energy that is released. It is unlikely that Natalie Dessay will ever give a greater performance than this. Her singing of each of the great arias is equally fascinating. The scene in which she and Rolando Villazón size each other up before speaking is exquisitely managed… Villazón makes a passionate hero. I cannot imagine that we will see another Manon to equal this for a long time. (Gramophone)

In the role of Eurydice, Natalie Dessay begins at once with a display of vocal and verbal pyrotechnics, which are then taken up by Yann Beuron as Orpheus. Together they give us an idea of the developments to follow. Dancers and singers melt into a unit. The stage setting and an unconventional choreography sparkle with inventiveness. When Pluto, for example, arrives on skis from the underworld onto Mt. Olympus and Offenbach quotes the famous can-can right in the middle of Pluto’s aria, it seems to be a parody of his own work. The production offers a wealth of material for modern interpretations of this operetta full to the brim with ironic sideswipes at morality and immorality.

It's tempting to think these duets, which Handel composed at various points in his career, are just chips from the master's block. But they constitute a delightful hour's worth of music, and when sung with the vocal brilliance and stylishness displayed here by ten top singers in various pairings, they add up to one of those rare discs it's hard to stop returning to. Handel must have thought a lot of them too–since he reused some of this music for oratorios like Messiah–and turned to the chamber duet form in his last years as well. There isn't a weak link among the soloists, though the contributions of Natalie Dessay, Veronique Gens, and Sara Mingardo are especially noteworthy. Whether asked to sing plaintive laments or flashy coloratura displays, these well-matched voices thrill.

For all its exotically tinged, trademark Orientalism, so fashionable in late-19th-century France, Delibe's opera Lakmé is at heart a simple story of tragically misplaced love. This marvelous and sensitively wrought interpretation renders the intensity of that love story with a surprising emotional credibility. Conductor Michel Plasson allows the music's arching melodies to breathe and unfold leisurely, like a lovingly cultivated floral display; he even discovers hidden nuances within the formulaic fluff that pads Delibe's score. And his vision is shared by the outstanding principals here. As the titular Hindu princess, Natalie Dessay gives a jewel-like performance, full of stunningly shaped phrases and tapered notes that sound like spun silk (and one that can favorably compare with Joan Sutherland's account on London).

Soprano Natalie Dessay leaves the dizzy heights of Bellini’s Amina, Donizetti’s Marie and Massenet’s Manon to inhabit the more discreet emotional and vocal world of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with a cast of fellow francophones.
“There’s more to life than top notes,” Natalie Dessay has said. She has, of course, made her reputation with the florid, stratospheric heroines of Romantic French and Italian opera, but in this new DVD from Vienna she portrays a heroine who presents few opportunities for vocal display, but many for subtle characterisation – Debussy’s Mélisande. Dessay had sung the role just once before, in concert in Edinburgh in 2005. Pelléas et Mélisande is full of ambiguity and its vocal lines closely reflect Maurice Maeterlink’s often enigmatic text. A few unaccompanied, ballad-like phrases are the closest Mélisande gets to an aria.

With this new production of La traviata at the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival, Natalie Dessay made her first European appearances as Verdi’s Violetta, a pinnacle of the soprano repertoire. She made her debut in the role in 2009 at the Santa Fe Festival in the US, and subsequently sang Violetta in Japan. Dessay’s 2011-12 season will include La traviata at the Vienna State Opera (in this Aix-en-Provence production by French theatre and opera director Jean-François Sivadier) and the New York Metropolitan.

In his latest Decca DVD release, bel canto star Juan Diego Flórez undertakes the role of Elvino in Bellini’s romantic drama, playing opposite the mercurial French soprano, Natalie Dessay, in the Met’s striking, modern-dress production from March 2009. Bellini’s romantic opera La Sonnambula (1831), hinges on the love and misunderstanding between Elvino and Amina (the ‘sleepwalker’ of the title). Discovered in the bedroom of Rodolfo, Amina is assumed to have been unfaithful, and Elvino cancels their wedding. But in the dramatic final scene, he witnesses Amina sleepwalking, understands her innocence, and all ends happily. Mary Zimmerman’s production plays with the dual realities of a rehearsal of the opera and a performance of the opera itself.

In this music, all is dialogue, mingled avowals and passions, on the threshold of the opera house. All Mozart’s forms are nurtured by the same source, that of vocal melody. “I like an aria to be as precisely tailored to a singer as a well-cut suit,” he declared when he composed an aria. And what an aria this one is. The keyboard enters into dialogue with the soloist.

Shani Diluka releases a great project dedicated to Marcel Proust and composers he loved, to celebrate the 150-year anniversary of his birth in 2021 and the 100-year anniversary of his death in 2022. It features Reynaldo Hahn's rarely played Piano Concerto and works by Fauré, Gluck, Massenet, R. Strauss, and Debussy. The album is recorded with the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris conducted by Hervé Niquet. The Proust album features Pierre Fouchenneret (violin), Natalie Dessay (soprano), and Guillaume Gallienne (narrator, from the Comédie Francaise).

What a wonderful contrast! Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Bach’s Magnificat represent the two oft-compared composers at Dixit . He had already written two Italian operas, and his career path clearly pointed in that direction. The Dixit is as extravagant as Bach’s Magnificat is controlled. The two pieces are such a good fit that one wonders why they haven’t turned up together more frequently, if, in fact, they have at all.