The lithe, lively voice of soprano
Lisette Oropesa has been accumulating admirers, and she seems to hit her stride with this collection of French-language arias, which hit classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2022. The idea of French bel canto arias might seem oxymoronic, but
Rossini and his followers did not abandon their Italian operatic style when they began to write operas for Paris. Instead, they amped the whole thing up a bit, creating massive works, many in five acts, that continue to challenge today's best singers.
Rossini's Guillaume Tell, despite its famous overture, is not often heard, for it poses substantial challenges, vocally and production-wise.
Oropesa, not so much a powerhouse as a rather uncannily agile singer, is an ideal artist to tackle these challenges and those of the slightly earlier and even rarer Le siège de Corinth. She writes in the booklet of her enthusiasm at bringing to life the works on the album, which are mostly to the seldom heard side. At the end, she exploits the listener's pent-up desire to hear some big, familiar tunes with excerpts from
Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and La fille du régiment, but this is nevertheless a fresh, exciting program that offers all kinds of insight into the operatic world in the second quarter of the 19th century, from a really interesting voice that is in its prime.
Oropesa receives fine support from the
Dresden Philharmonic under
Corrado Rovaris, and a largely American engineering team gets idiomatic sound from the Kulturpalast in Dresden. This would, among other things, make a good gift for an opera lover in 2022 or any other year. ~ James Manheim