Pentatone Announces Lisette Oropesa’s New Album ‘Rossini & Donizetti: French Bel Canto Arias’
By David SalazarPentatone is set to release a new album featuring Lisette Oropesa this October.
The album, entitled “Rossini & Donizetti: French Bel Canto Arias” will be available digitally and exclusively on Pentatone’s official website before going into wide digital release on Oct. 7, 2022
In the album, which features the famed soprano alongside Corrado Rovaris and the Dresdener Philharomonie and the Sächsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden, will include arias from such operas as “Guillaume Tell,” “La siège de Corinthe,” “Le comte Ory,” “Les martyrs,” “Lucie de Lammermour,” and “La fille du régiment.”
“I was in Paris a few years ago singing a marvelous opera by Meyerbeer, and was so inspired by Le grand opéra français and its role in the Italian bel canto composers’ works. Growing up in Louisiana, French was the first foreign language that I studied, so I have a deep appreciation for the way it sounds and the way it feels to sing in French,” Oropesa said in an official press release by Pentatone. “When I began my vocal studies in college, I worked on a lot of French art songs, and also a few French operatic arias, but the majority of my training was in Italian bel canto and Mozart. After having made a wonderful journey into Mozart’s concert arias for my first recording, I was very excited to find a way to combine two of my greatest loves, the French language and Italian bel canto, into another album. Thus, the idea for recording arias from the French language works of Rossini and Donizetti was born. It has been a joy to explore lesser-known pieces, as well as the more popular ones, for the repertoire that we chose to feature in this album. There is so much out there, and a lot of it gets performed so rarely outside of festivals dedicated to Rossini and Donizetti.”