RECORDINGS

Elsa Dreisig credits Mozart with being the composer who first inspired her to become a professional singer. Now the French-Danish soprano pays him tribute with an album devoted entirely to arias from his operas. Its title, Mozart x 3, reflects a programme constructed around the three masterpieces composed to libretti written by Lorenzo Da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. Elsa Dreisig sings arias allocated to three different characters in each of these operas. The total of nine ‘Da Ponte arias’ is complemented by three arias from examples of the dignified genre opera seria: La clemenza di Tito, Idomeneo and Lucio Silla. Accompanying Elsa Dreisig is the Kammerorchester Basel, conducted by Louis Langrée.

Soprano Elsa Dreisig follows her debut album Miroir(s) with a recital of songs in collaboration with pianist Jonathan Ware. Taking its title, Morgen, from one of Richard Strauss’s best-loved lieder, it interweaves his music (notably the Four Last Songs) with thematically linked works by Sergey Rachmaninov and Henri Duparc. As Elsa Dreisig says, “Morgen is an inner journey through the seasons of the soul.”

Miroirs showcases Elsa Dreisig’s vocal and dramatic range with arias and scenes that offer different ‘reflections’ on an operatic situation or character … Marguerite from Gounod’s Faust and Massenet’s Thaïs both contemplate themselves in a mirror … Rossini’s playful Rosina, in love with the disguised Count Almaviva, becomes Mozart’s married and melancholy Countess… Shakespeare’s Juliet prepares to take a fateful potion in two French arias, by Gounod and Steibelt … The fickle Manon Lescaut is portrayed by both Massenet and Puccini, while the Judean Princess Salome is characterised in strikingly contrasting terms by Massenet and Strauss. Dreisig’s dual national heritage (her Danish-born mother is also a soprano) is reflected in her partners for the recording, the Orchestre national Montpellier Occitanie Pyrénées Méditerranée and the conductor Michael Schønwandt, who spent over a decade as music director of Copenhagen’s Royal Opera.