Track Listing

1. Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin - Heia in den Bergen
2. Heuberger: Der Opernball - Geh'n wir ins Chambre séparée
3. Lehár: Giuditta - Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß
4. Charpentier: Louise - Depuis le jour
5. Offenbach: Les Contes d'Hoffmann - Barcarolle
6. R. Strauss - Cäcilie, op. 27 no. 2
7. Grieg: Peer Gynt - Solveig's song
8. Messager: Fortunio - Lorsque je n'étais qu'une enfant
9. Dvořák: Gypsy Melodies - Songs My Mother Taught Me
10. R. Strauss - Wiegenlied, op. 41 no. 1
11. Rimsky-Korsakov - Not the wind, blowing from the heights, op. 43 no. 2
12. Rimsky-Korsakov - Eastern Song: Enslaved by the rose, the nightingale, op. 2 no. 2
13. Traditional: Schlof sche, mein Vögele
14. Lloyd Weber: Requiem - Pie Jesu
15. Hahn - L'enamourée
16. Guastavino - La rosa y el sauce
17. Giménez: La tempranica - La Tarántula
18. Arditi - Il Bacio

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81696 in Music
• Released on: 2008-11-11
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Limited Edition

Album Description
On her fourth album for Deutsche Grammophon, opera superstar Anna Netrebko gives a very personal and intimate performance of cherished lighter works. From sparkling operetta classics to seductive salon songs, each selection comes with a special memory for Netrebko. Netrebko is joined by some friends, Elı¯na Garancˇa and Piotr Beczala-- her joy of collaboration is heard in these magnificent selections. Anna Netrebko is one of DG's best-selling artists and consistently performs in sold-out opera houses and concert halls around the world. She returns to the Metropolitan Opera in January 2009 in Lucia di Lammermoor. Available in a special, deluxe limited edition package! The beautiful cap box includes the CD; a DVD of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and musical excerpts; beautiful booklet; three postcards and one poster of Netrebko. A must-have for Netrebko fans and the perfect holiday gift!

The Independent (London), January 2008
"Netrebko is, in a word, sensational . . . Netrebko's strength is not just in the mobility of her voice and the razzle-dazzle of her upper register's big-money notes - no, it's the fullness and beauty of the middle voice that singles her out . . . properly overwhelming. For once, fullness of heart is truly matched in fullness of sound."

From the Artist
ABOUT THE PIECES
Emmerich Kálmán: Heia, in den Bergen
The eponymous "csárdás princess" of Kálmán's ever-popular 1915 operetta Die Csárdásfürstin (in English usually, though imprecisely, called The Gypsy Princess) is Sylva Varescu, a Hungarian cabaret singer who becomes engaged to a prince. Sylva's dazzling opening number, sung on the stage of her chic Budapest nightclub, mixes Magyar exoticism with Viennese charm.

Richard Heuberger: Im Chambre séparée
In the operetta Der Opernball, Heuberger's 1898 masterpiece, the housemaid Hortense disguises herself as a masked lady to attend a glamorous Parisian opera ball. In this seductive duet, she invites the attractive young naval cadet Henri to join her in a private room for a "tête à tête".

Franz Lehár: Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss
In Lehár's bittersweet 1934 operetta Giuditta, the beautiful heroine abandons her husband to be with Octavio, an army captain. When he leaves her to pursue his military career, she becomes a night-club performer in North Africa - and a rather successful one, it would seem from this, the operetta's hit number.

Gustave Charpentier: Depuis le jour
The heroine of Charpentier's Louise is a Parisian dressmaker who has fallen in love with the bohemian poet Julien, but their relationship scandalizes her narrow-minded parents. In this, the opera's most famous aria, Louise tells her lover that her life has become one of indescribable happiness since she met him. At the end of the opera she abandons her parents to live with him - a surprisingly modern ending for an opera written in the 1890s.

Jacques Offenbach: Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour (Barcarolle)
In Offenbach's 1881 opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann, we witness the poet E.T.A. Hoffmann's doomed love-affairs in three cities. This famous duet, sung by the courtesan Giulietta and Hoffmann's friend Nicklausse (a mezzo role), is set on a Venetian lagoon. Offenbach originally composed it for his ill-fated romantic opera Die Rheinnixen, but it found a happier home in this, his last and greatest work.

Richard Strauss: Cäcilie
Strauss presented this ravishing song to the soprano Pauline de Ahna, his bride-to-be, on the day before their wedding in 1894. The text was the poet Heinrich Hart's tribute to his own wife, Cäcilie. Although Strauss and his spouse were opposites in temperament - he was phlegmatic and de Ahna fiery - this ecstatic piece proved prophetic of their long union.

Edvard Grieg: Solveig's Song
Solveig is the patient and long-suffering love of Peer Gynt's life, but he abandons her to seek adventure in the world. Solveig nevertheless sings of her love for Peer in this haunting lullaby, composed by Grieg for the first performance of Ibsen's play in 1876.

André Messager: Lorsque je n'étais qu'une enfant
In Messager's 1907 opera Fortunio - a great success at Paris's Opéra-Comique - Jacqueline is using the naïve young Fortunio as a decoy to draw attention from her real love affair with a soldier. When Fortunio reveals how deeply he loves her, she rejects him.

Antonín Dvořák: Kdyz mne stará matka
Dvořák composed a cycle of Gypsy Melodies to texts by the poet Adolf Heyduk in 1880, and this sweetly sentimental ballad from the set has become his best-known song, famous in English under the title Songs My Mother Taught Me. He made this Czech version of the song soon after setting the original German text.

Richard Strauss: Wiegenlied
Lullaby
Strauss composed this rapt, haunting lullaby in 1899 to a poem by Richard Dehmel, and dedicated it to his friend Mme. Marie Rösche (née Ritter). The accompaniment was originally for piano, but Strauss himself later adapted it for orchestra.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Ne veter, veya s vïsotï
Not the wind, blowing from the heights
This charming song, comparing the effect of the wind on the poet's body to the effect that his beloved has on his soul, was composed in 1897 to a text by Count Aleksei Tolstoy (a relation of the novelist Lev Tolstoy). This, and the following song, are both orchestrated here for the first time.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Plenivshis' rozoy, solovey
Enslaved by the rose, the nightingale
Rimsky-Korsakov wrote this Oriental romance in 1866, and dedicated it to Malvina, the wife of his friend and fellow-composer César Cui. The words are from an 1831 poem by Aleksei Kol'tsov, written in imitation of the style of the literary giant Aleksandr Pushkin. With its sinuous faux-oriental melody, it reflects the fascination with the eastern reaches of the empire which pervaded Russian culture at the time.

Schlof sche, mein Vögele
Sleep well, my little bird
Very little is known about the origins of this traditional Yiddish lullaby, but its sad and tender beauty has ensured that it touches hearts whenever it is performed.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Pie Jesu
Lloyd Webber's 1985 Requiem was written as a response to the harrowing plight of Cambodian orphans in the early 1980s, as well as to the death of his father in 1982. It was an immediate success, and later won a Grammy®. The Pie Jesu, a duet for soprano and boy treble, also rose surprisingly high in the UK pop charts.

Reynaldo Hahn: L'Énamourée
The Loved One
The Venezuelan-born Hahn composed his first song aged eight and entered the Paris Conservatoire at ten. This exquisite and pensive melody dates from 1892, when he was still only

Carlos Guastavino: La rosa y el sauce
Guastavino's reputation is based almost entirely on his songs. Luscious, tonal and influenced by folk music, they have been enormously popular in the composer's native Argentina since the 1940s - La rosa y el sauce (The Rose and the Willow) from 1942 is one of the best known. In recent decades their appeal has been spreading around the rest of the world.

Gerónimo Giménez: La tarántula é un bicho mú malo
Giménez's zarzuela (a form of Spanish operetta with a high proportion of dialogue) La tempranica (The Headstrong Girl) was a huge hit at its premiere in Madrid in 1900. It tells the story of María, a young gypsy who falls in love with a nobleman but who comes to realize that their love is impossible. La tarántula, a lively zapateado (a Spanish dance in triple time), is performed as a diversion by María's brother Grabié, a trouser role.

Luigi Arditi: Il bacio
The Italian composer, violinist and conductor Luigi Arditi toured the world before deciding to settle down in London in his 30s. It was there that he wrote this, his most popular song, in 1860. Il bacio (The Kiss) has been a favourite ever since among singers possessing a good coloratura technique.

Customer Reviews

A refreshing recital with mass appeal
Behind the Vogue magazine cover photo and the fan-based DVD and promotionals, we have a vocal recital to deal with. The best thing about Anna Netrebko is that she isn't all image, lovely as hers is. She's bidding to join Angela Gheorghiu as a permanent opera star with a lasting legacy. One requirement in that ascendency is to release an album of crossover mass apeal while still remaining respectably opratic.

This refreshing CD sets out to accomplish that and generally succeeds. The listener is softened up with three operetta lollipops to start off. Like Gheorghiu, Netrebko was trained to have a Slavic voice. Both sopranos work hard to ovrcome the drawbacks of the Slavic sound, which is darker, more throaty and chesty than Western opera voices. I don't know if Netrebko has gotten all the way -- her Lehar and Kalman heroines sound as if they are from Eastern Europe more than Vienna or Paris. She has yet to find light-hearted charm.

"Depuis le jour" puts in a bid for comparison with famous accounts from the young Leontyne Price and Kiri Te Kanawa, who were knockouts in this aria. Netrebko isn't -- she lacks that thrilling, ethereal extension on top that makes the listener float away. But she's certainly lovely to listen to in her own right. The Barcarolle from "Tales of Hoffmann" suits her better; it's soulful and dreamy, a good combination for her temperament.

As the program unfolds, we hit all the right beats for a mass-appeal album but with sidelong glances to the more knowing. Richard Strauss's "Caecille" is one of his most sumptuous orchestrated songs, and here Netrebko is thrilling, beyond reproach even if her German is sketchy. And so it goes. "Solveig's Song" is close enough to Slavic in mood that it brings out her best side, as do the items by Dvorak and (naturally) Rimsky-Korsakov.

What does it all add up to? I think the public will continue to love their new diva, but eveen for us grumpy connoisseurs, who have been holding out a bit, there's a bright light. When Netreboko stops being all things to all people, what she actually is is a fine Slavic soprano with potential in French and German music. DG pushed Netrebko into Verdi and Puccini because that's where the limelight shines. In the end, however, they will do full justice by showing off her strongest suit, not her most glamorous (and profitable).

Netrebko at her poetic best!
This is probably my favorite cd by Anna Netrebko, (although her Duets
cd with Rolando is up there too)!
The "Barcarolle" from "Les Contes D'Hoffmann" that she sings with
Elina Garanca, is one of my favorites on the cd. Also , the Yiddish
lullaby, and the song by Dvorak! All the pieces are serene and beautiful.
You will want to keep this close by, to memorize by heart.
She just keeps getting better.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Stunningly Beautiful
This is a stunningly beautiful CD, like the singer herself. Her choice of music for this CD is superb, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys gorgeous music sung with sensitivity and warmth. Her voice makes you feel the emotion of every song and her rendition of Songs My Mother Taught Me brought tears to my eyes, it is magnificent. Other standouts are Barcarolle, Pie Jesu, and Meine Lippen, sie Kussen so heiss. In fact there are no songs on this album that are a disappointment - buy it for yourself, or as a gift for someone this holiday - you won't be sorry. Anna Netrebko goes from strength to strength and one thing I love about her is her diction, you can understand every word (if you understand the language) and the sheer passion and emotion she brings to each piece is beyond compare - absolutely sublime.