Few singers over the years have given me as much pleasure as Natalie Dessay.  She and pianist Philippe Cassard have now announced their upcoming retirement from concert performance (Natalie retired from the stage a few years ago) and are about to release an album of their farewell tour material.  It’s called Oiseaux de passage and it’s half an hour or so of bird themed chansons with some English language musical theatre numbers included for good measure.

In fact it kicks off with three songs in English; “I want magic” from André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, “Green finch and linnet bird” from Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Laetitia’s aria from Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief.  These are all sung impeccably with a real sense of Broadway style, especially the somewhat more operatic Sondheim.

The rest of the record is in French and it’s all 20th century material except for one Chausson piece from 1882.  There are songs by Samuel Barber, Reynaldo Hahn, Maurice Ravel, Louis Beydts and Francis Poulenc.  I particularly liked Hahn’s Le rossignol des lilas which is very Hahn, very beautiful and suits Natalie’s voice very well.  I also enjoyed the quite dramatic and very funny La Dame de Monte-Carlo by Poulenc which closes out the record.  Overall, it’s a very well sung and played mini-concert.

It was recorded in the 500 seat Le Nef at Le Couvent des Dominicains in Guebwiller in September last year and it’s a very natural and clear sounding recording.  It’s being released as a physical CD, MP3 and FLAC/ALAC/WAV at 44.1 kHz/16 bit and 96kHz/24 bit resolutions.  I listened to the CD res version.  The booklet is a hoot.  As well as text and translations it has the original letters, phone messages and so on that eventually led to the pair collaborating albeit with some reluctance on Natalie’s part.

Catalogue information: La Dolce Volta LDV150.  (Release date 28th March or 112th April depending which source one reads!)