French Bel Canto Arias – Lisette Oropesa

There’s a moment about four minutes into “Que vais-je devenir?” where Lisette Oropesa lets a phrase simply hang in the air, unsupported by any orchestral cushioning, and you understand immediately why she wanted to make this record. The sound floats. It doesn’t strain. Three decades of Met broadcasts have trained American ears to expect coloratura sopranos who sound like they’re wrestling alligators in the upper register — Oropesa sounds like she’s arranging flowers.

That’s not faint praise. It’s the highest compliment I know how to pay a bel canto singer.

The premise here is smart, and slightly contrarian. Everybody records Italian Rossini and Donizetti — the arsenal of Lucia mad scenes and “Una voce poco fa“s that fill up budget-label anthologies by the yard. Oropesa, born in Louisiana to Cuban parents and now genuinely fluent in French, went looking instead for the French versions these composers wrote expressly for Paris, where both spent long, formative stretches of their careers bending Italian vocal writing to French taste, French text accentuation, French theatrical convention. It’s an underexplored corner of the repertoire and she’s right that it deserves better than the occasional French Radio broadcast excerpt.

The revelation is Le siège de Corinthe, Rossini’s 1826 reworking of his own Maometto II for the Paris Opéra. Pamyra’s scene “Que vais-je devenir?” gets an interpretation of real weight and intelligence here: the recitative is shaped with a rhetorical freedom that never curdles into indulgence, the sustained lines spun out with that peculiar Rossinian trick of sounding both mournful and elegant at once. Few sopranos alive can do the slow, grieving cantilena and the frothy fioritura with equal conviction. Oropesa can. Her trill, increasingly a lost art, is a real trill, even and sustained, not just an approximate wobble.

From Le comte Ory she brings lightness and comic sparkle without cheapening the vocal line into operetta patter. The excerpts from Guillaume Tell remind you how much gorgeous vocal writing gets buried under that opera’s overture and its four-hour running time. Mathilde’s music particularly suits her: the tone stays creamy even as the tessitura climbs, no hint of the steely edge some lighter voices develop past the staff.

Donizetti fares just as well, maybe better commercially, since “À la faveur de cette nuit” and company from Lucie de Lammermoor, the 1839 Paris retooling of Lucia di Lammermoor, with its own textual quirks and different orchestral touches, will draw listeners who know the Italian original cold and want to hear what changes. Quite a lot changes, actually: recitatives compressed, ornamentation altered, the French prosody forcing new melodic contours in places. Oropesa navigates the differences like she’s lived with both versions her whole career.

La fille du régiment‘s Marie gets an interpretation full of soubrettish charm but never soubrettish thinness — this is still a lyric coloratura instrument with real substance underneath the sparkle. And the Les martyrs excerpt, Donizetti’s French expansion of Poliuto, is a genuine discovery, rarely performed, gorgeously sung.

Corrado Rovaris conducts the Dresdner Philharmonie with idiomatic ease. The Sächsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden sound plush and well-drilled in the choral passages, though the engineering occasionally places them at a slight remove, as if overheard through a doorway rather than sharing the stage. Minor complaint. The Pentatone engineers, working in the Kulturpalast Dresden, give Oropesa’s voice a bloom that flatters without artificially inflating it. You hear breath, you hear the occasional scrape of consonant against microphone, the human mechanics of bel canto singing rather than a digitally sanded façade.

Does this unseat existing recordings in this repertoire? There isn’t much competition, frankly — that’s rather the point of the album. Individual arias turn up scattered across historical anthologies (Sutherland recorded some of this French material decades ago, magnificently, with less linguistic idiomaticity), but nobody has assembled quite this program, with this consistency of vocal quality and this level of French-language conviction, in one sitting.

Sixty-five minutes, generously filled, intelligently conceived, beautifully sung. Bel canto lovers should not hesitate.