CD with DVD: Natalie Dessay/Evelino Pidò with Concerto Köln: Italian Opera Arias

Is it the season for overreacting? Temperatures are soaring, water mains are breaking, the kids are out of school, everyone seems to be on a job hunt or vacation, and of course there are all those wedding invitations begging for an RSVP.

So if you crave a little escapism, it's entirely understandable. In fact, I'll probably join you.

That's where Natalie Dessay and this week's classical selection come in. As far as I'm concerned, there are opera stars for the working day, and then there are those who seem to have arrived from a different world. Where did we find this sylph of a soprano who at one moment is being carried aloft by a chorus of soldiers in La Fille du Regiment and at another is so nightmarishly believable as the tragic bride in Lucia di Lammermoor?

Well, of course the lady is French, and her stage aspirations began with dance and acting, only to gravitate towards vocal training. If you have seen any footage of Dessay's stage performances, you'll know that she remains very much the actress.

Her realm is that of a lyric coloratura soprano, and if her voice is neither big nor dramatic, it retains a youthful freshness, which serves her well on several of the roles in this recital disc. I was particularly taken with Dessay's interpretation of Giulietta from Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which is, as alert readers have already surmised, a variation on Romeo and Juliet.

Still, the journey to bel canto roles surely is intense for someone like Dessay, who has spent a good deal of her career with Mozart and Offenbach.

And these bel canto heroines are some complicated ladies. Despite the presence of such relative innocents as Gilda (Rigoletto) and Giulietta, this is definitely an album of the jaded, the victimized, and the downright deranged. With the exception of Elvira (I Puritani), every last role Dessay sings is that of a doomed woman, and I think she means to stride resolutely away from the soubrette side of things and towards greater challenges.

She puts that light but agile voice, and her acting talents, at the service of the music. Her official repertoire hints that much of this is a departure for her, but it raises the interesting possibility that the future holds many evenings with Dessay playing desperate courtesans and condemned monarchs.

But to go with all this aural emotion you need the visual from the DVD, and it is, as you might expect, a selection from the Metropolitan Opera's production of Lucia di Lammermoor. This is something special, and not only because the disc is playable in multiple regions.

You won't be surprised to learn that they've chosen one of the most disturbing scenes of the opera stage, but it's so beautifully staged, acted, and filmed, I was transfixed. Note too the distinctive choices made with instrumentation, for here they've used the glass harmonica to accompany the mad Lucia, as per Donizetti's original intention, rather than the solo flute version he subsequently wrote. The effect is appropriately eerie.

Here comes the bride...