On her new album Rio-Paris, soprano Natalie Dessay continues to explore musical territories beyond opera and classical song. Following her last recording with Michel Legrand, Dessay now visits Rio de Janeiro, the city that will host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. She is joined by guitarist Liat Cohen and two singers, Agnès Jaoui and Helena Noguerra, in this encounter between France and Brazil.

The album features music by Villa-Lobos, Gilberto and Jobim, and by Egberto Amin Gismonti (b. 1947 in Rio de Janeiro), a composer, guitarist and pianist who studied in Paris with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger, and whose other musical influences include Jimi Hendrix; guitarist Baden Powell de Aquino (1937-2000) -named after the founder of the scouting movement and normally known simply as Baden Powell; the poet and bossa nova composer Marcus Vinicius da Cruz e Mello Moraes (1913-1980), generally known simply as Vinicius de Moraes; the Paraguayan guitarist and composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré (1885-1944); and Waldir Azevedo (1923-1980) -another native Carioca- who played the ukulele-like cavaquinho and who specialised in choro, an intricate instrumental genre that originated in Rio in the 19th century.

Liat Cohen is a French-trained Israeli classical guitarist. She has made something of a speciality of the music of Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, whose origins lie in Spain and Portugal. Agnès Jaoui, a French actress, screenwriter, and singer, was born to a Sephardi family in Tunisia, and is the adoptive mother of two Brazilian children. She has recorded two albums of songs in Spanish and Portuguese. Helena Noguerra is a sultry Belgian-born singer and actress of Portuguese descent.