Bellini: La sonnambula

“Quite simply, Natalie Dessay is the most accomplished and the most affecting Amina on record since Callas,” wrote BBC Music Magazine, awarding five stars to this recording of La sonnambula. Made in the soprano’s native city of Lyon, it was conducted by Evelino Pidò, praised by Opera magazine for his “exquisite sensibility [in] shaping melodies and providing the principal singers with expressive opportunities”. Two of today’s finest Italian singers play the men whose lives become entangled with Amina’s innocent sleepwalking: tenor Francesco Meli and bass Carlo Colombara.