Castrata Diva
Cecilia Bartoli’s latest vanity release bucks protocol to present an album heavy on historical concept.
The classical recording industry has long feasted on the popularity of operatic solo records, especially during the last few years of industry-wide decline in CD sales. Incidentally, as record companies run out of ways to sell the standard repertoire to collectors who already own it five times, baroque and early opera are also selling well.
The coloratura mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has managed to combine both of these formats in her newest CD release. Sacrificium is her take on twelve major arias from the lost repertoire of the Castrato. The CD has been marketed high and low, using the tag line “The Sacrifice of Hundreds of Thousands of Boys in the Name of Music” and through a viral internet scavenger hunt that planted riddles on blog sites.
The packaging of the first release, a Deluxe 2-CD Limited Edition
Sacrificium is clever both in its concept and as a way of refashioning Ms. Bartoli’s appeal and repertoire. In recent years she has gravitated toward recordings and concert performances (as many superstar vocal artists do), and has taken on fewer operatic parts. In live appearances, she sticks close to home, and continues to sing the mezzo repertoire of Mozart and Handel with aplomb and agility.
On CD, rather than just milk well-known favorites, she has admirably introduced audiences to forgotten repertoire from Rossini and composers little-known today like Halevy and Viardot. The composers included in Sacrificium include such household names as Porpora, Leo, Araia, Graun, Caldara, and (not that) Leonardo Vinci.
While there is much to be learned about the castrato from the ornate accompanying booklet, Bartoli’s singing lends few insights to authenticity. Liner notes tell us that the castrati were not necessarily preferable to female singers; rather, they were simply easier to train. Add, too, that a boy could be trained from youth while a girl must wait until after puberty to find her voice, and we get an idea of the very luxurious attitude toward the sacrifice in question.
Ms. Bartoli’s singing here is practically beside the point. Her style has always meant a certain breathy quality, quite in evidence here. This has alienated opera house purists, yet it may be precisely her appeal in the vaguely crossover market she has come to occupy. As her voice has aged, it has also tended toward an undesirable cluckiness in the lower register. Sacrificium displays these flaws, and some pitch imprecision in her coloratura, but the singing is emotive, committed, attractively colored and – dare I say – fierce.
Her partners in this exercise are the eminent and thoroughly Italianate period group Il Giardino Armonico, led by Giovanni Antonini. They carry the day, with a lean and sensitive accompaniment that is never afraid to burst forth with uncouth rustic fervor when called upon. The recorded sound is sumptuous and especially gratifying in its spacious bass response.
Unfortunately Vinci’s “Chi temea Giove regnante,” one of many world-premiere recordings on this disc, is marred by a thunderbolt sound effect which upon repetition grows tiresome and then offensive. If only Ms. Bartoli and her producers had sacrificed this cheap effect – in the name of music.
La Cieca is happy to welcome Our Own squirrel to the ranks of parterre.com contributors.
Sound effects during an aria? Good Lord! Culshaw had better taste than that. But ‘vaguely crossover’? I mean, either you is or you aint, and since Cecilia is a classically trained vocalist who confines herself to classical music, I dont see how she is a crossover artist.
I’d be interested to know what her royalty is on each CD sold. Alagna said he got 25 Eurocents per CD. Thus selling 20,000 CDs would net him 5,000 Euros or less than one tenth of what he would make from one concert. Joyce DiDonato agreed on her blog that CDs don’t make singers any money (she didn’t say what her royalty is but I suspect it is rather like Alagna’s). Florez has also said that You Tube has ruined the CD business. I would think she makes her money from recitals and makes CDs for the publicity.
Claptrap. The pesky rodent fails to mention the groundbreaking work in the 18th century literature by Lehane and the late lamented Watts.
#2 – I’d be surprised if DiDonato could command the same royalty rate as Alagna. I could be wrong, but to me there is a big difference between a long established guy with a claim to be one of the world’s most popular tenors, compared to a lyric mezzo-soprano who has only recently come to prominence.
#1 – it depends on your definition of crossover. Whilst I probably wouldn’t have come up with it myself to describe what Bartoli does, she is having a very different kind of career from most of the singers we discuss on this site. In a sense, she is a crossover artist in that she performs next to no staged opera and hence cannot really be judged on the same terms as the likes of DiDonato who is pursuing a more convential career. Bartoli sticks to recordings and concert tours to promote those recordings, and has managed to win favour with a much wider public than most other contemporary classical vocal artists. She is having the career of a crossover artist without actually compromising on repertoire.
Having listened to the recording (admittedly but once) and read the commentary herein and elsewhere, one enormously disappointing and unavoidable truth about myself rears its ugly head:
I have no sense of fine discrimination whatsoever and should be put to immediate death, for I really enjoyed most all of the tracks and applaud Bartoli’s championing of this rep.
I do, however, regret some of the packaging decisions which served to refocus attentions to the more lurid aspects of the practice.
#5: While she does have a good deal more popularity than virtually any other classical artist(her albums actually chart in some countries),she isn’t a crossover artist like sarah b., katherine j. or bocelli. Unlike those fakers, she has proven herself at the worlds greatest houses, even the giant Met. But I do find it kind of perverse that the worlds most famous ‘opera singer’ rarely sings opera.
Miss Kitty and others: don’t feel bad about liking who you like, be it Bartoli or Renee or whoever, just because some of the queens on this site dont like them. Just dont start liking Paul Potts; for then we shall indeed have to kill you.
#7 – yes, I realise she isn’t like Jenkins, Bocelli or Brightman. That was my point – that there is room for more than one definition of crossover.
Squirrel, excellent job. Though I do quibble somewhat with the idea that the singing is beside the point. I thought that was the point.