Cuban-born American soprano Lisette Oropesa is a newcomer to the world of opera singers, releasing an album devoted to the French operas of Rossini and Donizetti. Unusually, she was thrust into the public eye when a member of the audience sang an excerpt from La Traviata with her during a recital at the Verdi Festival in Parma, Italy, in 2021. The video immediately went viral around the world.The young singer has become a real star since her debut at the MET in New York, where she played Susanna in The marriage of Figaro at the age of 22, and then went on to receive great success at the Paris Opera in Abduction from the Seraglio (Konstanze), Rigoletto (Gilda) and The Barber of Seville (Rosina). She dedicates this brilliant recital with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra (conducted by Corrado Rovaris) to the ‘Grande Boutique’, the nickname given by Verdi to the Paris Opera.There are excerpts from Rossini's Siège de Corinthe, Guillaume Tell and Comte Ory alongside Donizetti’s Les Martyrs, Lucia di Lammermoor and La Fille du regiment. The latter concludes the album with his famous Salut à la France, which was patriotically performed on bank holiday evenings on the 14th of July in many French opera houses. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York on 28th December 1940 – the start of the German occupation – this aria was sung by Lily Pons and followed by La Marseillaise (the French national anthem) sung by soloists and chorus. © François Hudry/Qobuz

While from a musical standpoint Toi + Moi sounds fairly typical of French pop in 2008, Grégoire is more than just another contemporary singer/songwriter with a blockbuster hit on his hands. Make no mistake, he was a national phenomenon in France, where "Toi + Moi" was an inescapable smash hit, heard around the clock on the radio and streamed millions of times on the Internet. Grégoire was such a phenomenon that he inspired a backlash, with seemingly as many people loathing his music as loving it. The root cause of the phenomenon is not so much Grégoire himself, or even the music heard on Toi + Moi. It's more about how the album came to be. Grégoire was the first artist produced by My Major Company, a Web-based company that promotes independent artists and raises money for the production of their music. According to the company's website, 347 different people donated upward of six thousand euro for the production of Grégoire's debut album, which was ultimately released in association with Warner Music France. The underlying idea is that common people can be empowered by the Internet to produce whatever music they value. The feel-good backstory of Toi + Moi was compelling enough to garner nationwide publicity for Grégoire in the news media, and the title track (whose video features dozens of the song's "producers") was picked up for airplay on the leading French radio stations RTL and NRJ. As for the music itself, it's fairly typical French pop with a contemporary singer/songwriter slant. Grégoire is backed by piano, acoustic guitar, percussion, and occasional string arrangements, and the songs are built around his vocals and lyrics. Though not especially talented as either a vocalist or lyricist, Grégoire has a distinct style, albeit dour in tone, and knows how to craft a middle-of-the-road hit. Love it or hate it, there's no question that the title track has all the makings of a blockbuster French pop hit, and many of the other songs sequenced at the beginning of the album also have hit potential, including "Ta Main," "Nuages," "Rien à Voir," "Donne-Moi une Chance," and "Rue des Étoiles." Yet one can't escape the creeping feeling throughout Toi + Moi that the idea of the album (music for the people by the people thanks to the Internet) is more appealing than the music itself, which is too often mediocre.© Jason Birchmeier /TiVo

That globetrotting composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote La Princesse jaune in 1872, exemplifying the current craze for all things Japanese. Kornélis, played by the tenor Mathias Vidal, dreams only of the Land of the Rising Sun. Under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion, he becomes infatuated with Ming, a fantasy princess. His cousin Léna – the soprano Judith van Wanroij – despairs of this passion and does not dare to confess her own feelings to Kornélis, who eventually comes to his senses. The running time of this opera enables us to offer a coupling in the shape of a previously unrecorded version of Saint-Saëns’s six Mélodies persanes, thus extending the guiding thread of a yearning for exotic horizons in another direction. Leo Hussain conducts the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse in both works. © Bru Zane

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2008's Enfants d'Hiver emerged very much the companion piece that 2006's Fictions seemed to be demanding, chilled out and melancholy as Birkin drifts between sweet childhood memories (hence the charming cover photo) and more bitter reflections on age; "Madame," one of the album's manifold highlights, mourns the realization that to the average passerby, she is now an "older woman" deserving of that respectful title. "It broke my heart," she sings, "like a slap...." What might surprise the casual listener is the inclusion of so many Birkin compositions -- she has rarely raised her pen in anger in the past (for obvious Serge Gainsbourg-shaped reasons), but here she writes, and writes well.© Dave Thompson /TiVo

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