16 OISEAUX DE PASSAGE Natalie has never been more charismatic and sparkling on stage than she was at the big events: her first recitals at Carnegie Hall (she, the diva assoluta of the Met!), the Vienna State Opera (which honoured her with the title of Kammersängerin), the Paris Opéra (which had given her a triumphal reception in 1992 after her now legendary Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann) and the Tokyo City Opera (in our view, the finest hall in the world) and its hundreds of admirers ready to wait two hours to get her autograph. Her extreme concentration and her nature as a hypersensitive artist, always inspired, generous, commanding, brought to incandescence by countless hours of rehearsals, have given me goosepimples more than once when accompanying her, and have never ceased to nourish my own work as a musician. For this farewell tour, which will take us to our final one hundred and thirty-fifth concert in 2025, Natalie wanted to pay tribute to the American music that she knows so well and has always adored. A jazz aficionada (I remember evenings with her at the Village Vanguard and Lincoln Center in New York), she is also a fan of musicals (we saw Bette Midler in Mary Poppins on Broadway) and especially the works of Stephen Sondheim (whose Passion she sang in 2016 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris). He and André Previn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber will be on the programme of the album and the concerts.
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