15 NATALIE DESSAY ∙ PHILIPPE CASSARD Our repertoire, initially confined to Debussy and some mélodies by Chabrier, Fauré, Duparc and Chausson, soon expanded to include Poulenc’s cycles on poems by Louise de Vilmorin, lieder by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Alma Mahler and Hans Pfitzner, and a few songs by Rachmaninoff. The ovation and the rapturous reviews that greeted Natalie at the Vienna Musikverein after a recital whose first half was devoted exclusively to Schubert encouraged her to record sixteen of his lieder. A slight departure from the rule that Natalie had laid down (‘No opera arias: I haven’t spent my life singing with the world’s greatest opera orchestras only to go back to a piano accompaniment’) enabled her to play three of the female roles from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (Susanna, Barbarina, the Countess) and to dare to tackle his concert aria with piano and orchestra Ch’io mi scordi di te.
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