Olga Peretyatko

Operatic powerhouse Olga Peretyatko is accompanied by the Munchner Rundfunkorchester (Munich Radio Orchestra) conducted by Miguel Gomez-Martinez on this high-quality album of (coloratura) soprano favorites. With an able, keen orchestra behind her, Peretyatko is free to demonstrate her considerable talents. Two arias are by opera legend Rossini. One, his "Non si dà follia maggiore," begins the album, and Peretyatko interprets it in a way that leaves the listener entranced. Peretyatko's voice is clean, bright, and full of vibrato. Her interpretation is also highly dramatic.

Mozart+ is an exceptional selection of some of the most beautiful concert and opera arias by W.A. Mozart as well as discoveries of largely unknown arias from operas by Tommaso Traetta, Giovanni Paisiello and Vicente Martín y Soler, reflecting the exchange of musical ideas between Mozart and his contemporaries and getting these three composers out of Mozart's shadow.

Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko is the latest in a group of young performers championed by the revived Sony Classical label. She's got personality to spare, and, from the looks of the pictures, charisma, too. Arabesque seems to be an album designed to showcase her suitability for a wide variety of roles; the program runs from Mozart forward through the 19th century and includes the Italian, French, and German languages (not that you get any of the texts in the CD booklet).

If The Secret is indeed the title of a melody that Gabriel Fauré composed on a poem rather cutesy Armand Silvestre, it does not seem that it inspired the title of the present album entitled "The Secret Fauré", taken rather in a meaning of scarcity and intimacy. Ivor Bolton, at the head of the Basel Symphony Orchestra where he is the artistic director, offers a very subtle choice composed of extracts from stage or stage music: Caligula, Pénélope, Shylock, Pelléas and Mélisande, mixed with some melodies orchestrated by Fauré or more probably by his friends, like Charles Koechlin. Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko, the new international queen of bel canto, lends her voice to Fauré's discreet art. Forgotten his many Traviata Berlin, MET or Vienna, for the benefit of a song of a modest limpidity. At his side, the tenor Benjamin Bruns and the women's choir Balthasar Neumann complete this disc which dedicates a certain French spirit seen elsewhere, made of a mixture of carefree, discreet elegance and a je-ne- know what futility.