INTERVIEW
The singer and actress Natalie Dessay was the guest of Media Culture this Thursday morning on Europe 1. Two weeks before the release of his new album On the black screen of my sleepless nights (Sony, November 15), a project Ten titles with composer Yvan Cassar in which she sings Claude Nougaro, Natalie Dessay explains how she had to work on her voice as a former soprano.
"Nothing is easy to sing," she says when asked about his covers of Claude Nougaro. For this album tribute to the iconic singer of Toulouse, died in 2004, that Natalie Dessay, who knew it, qualifies as "atypical" and "out of order", the former singer had to "unlearn everything to relearn a way to sing much more serious ".
"Eternal student"
"I take singing lessons every week with Pierre Babolat who teaches me to manage all the records of this new voice," says the one that ended his career in lyrical 2013. So, Natalie Dessay, who describes himself as "an eternal student", must learn to wear his chest voice higher. "The operatic voice is not a natural voice at all, especially mine, which was very high-it was my 'crazy voice', my voice as a human being, it's more like my voice of song. "
Claude Nougaro is one of Natalie Dessay's favorite singers, especially since she says she is "very sensitive to words". "That's why I stopped the opera, because I wanted to go more to the words, both in the theater and in the song," she adds.