Bartoli’s prohibited passion unleashed
REVIEW
High drama was the order of the night at Roy Thomson Hall when Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli dazzled the house with her vocal pyrotechnics.
This was one of the vocal highlights of the year. Although keyboard player Sergio Ciomei did his best to upstage the prima donna by fainting at the beginning of the Monday night concert’s second half, he quickly recovered and the audience was back in the palm of Bartoli’s hand. Her accompanists were the Orchestra La Scintilla of the Zürich Opera. The 25- member period- performance ensemble, led by violinist Ada Pesch, was up to the evening’s heavy demands. The music was drawn from Bartoli’s new album, Opera Proibita. The title refers to the papal orders at the turn of the 18th century that opera not be performed in Rome and that women not sing on stage. But as people are wont to do, the Eternal City’s patrons found some loopholes. Opera became oratorio, and the women’s roles were thereafter sung by castrati, men whose vocal — and sexual — development had been arrested by sharp, invasive, radical means.
Opera’s loss was oratorio’s gain, as Bartoli took us through a program of exquisite music by masters of the age: Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara and George Frideric Handel (the German who spent some time in Rome at the beginning of the 18th century).
Also on the program was a Concerto Grosso
by Arcangelo Corelli that fell victim to Ciomei’s fainting spell. In two other instrumentpieces, the orchestra played well, sounding good in the large expanse of Roy Thomson Hall thanks to the recent acoustical improvements. As for Bartoli, she wowed with her unmatched vocal technique and awe- inspiring breath control. What she doesn’t have in sheer vocal power she makes up for in remarkable flexibility and limberness.
Bartoli also has a charming stage presence that is both humble and regal. And she appears to unconditionally love the music she is performing.
For this writer, the highlights of the evening came in two of the less extroverted pieces. In “ Vanne pentita a piangere” from Caldara’s Il Trionfo dell’Innocenza, Bartoli and the players held the audience spellbound with their pianissimi.
In another quieter piece, “ Io sperai trovar nel ver” from Handel’s Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, the duet between Bartoli and oboist Jasu Moisio showed off remarkable delicacy as well as some un- Handelian musical invention. The lot of them could have kept performing all night, as far as Monday night’s audience was concerned.