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.
The only respectable course for Bartoli to have taken would have been roles such as Nancy in ALBERT HERRING, Hermia, Bianca, Miss Jessel and Kate in OWEN WINGRAVE plus Sir Michael’s Thea and She-Ancient. Some Birtwhistle and Ades on her resume might have given her bonafides as a serious musician; instead she has been dabbling in Gluck, Haydn and Vivaldi, lower-drawer hacks from the Continent.
OMG, what IS with the Baroque hate? Florid music being what it is cannot really do much, but I know what I’m looking for if I’m buying a Vivaldi/Porpora/***insert famous castrato***-themed CD : sheer pyrotechnics. You want drama, go to Puccini, Verdi & Wagner.
Bartoli’s voice IS small, but don’t take her to task for something she can’t change. Hate her for something else, something she shouldn’t have done, like that Norma project. Otherwise, if you don’t like it don’t bother.
Well Noel Dahling, Bartoli’s progress retardation? Why not call it that. I even have an CD example of her singing in Die Meistersinger!!!! She’s a mezzo that started out recording the Mozart’s and the Rossini’s and then did a sharp turn , becoming Baroque’s ‘nighclub act’ introducing this and that to an ignorant audience. A case of where people are encouraged to pay besotted homage to an artist( currently thought chic & cool). Do they have the time or inclination to investigate the content or worthiness. It is ‘Gee whiz….. its Cecilia’: self stylized class act at contorted facial expressions emitting sound, f…k what she is singing , f…k if she is really having everybody ‘ON’!… and just ‘discovering’ things to cover up vocal shortcomings. A case of ‘performers wanting you to believe’ what they want you to believe. Well enjoy this spoon fed musical icing….I find it rots one’s nerves, insults the mind and destroys attention span.
Some forget that massive tons and I mean tons of ‘ancient scholarly music’: has been placed before the classical record buying public for the last 4 to 5 decades, if one kept a close watch on what was released. I found out, digging (literally around on the floor on one’s knees) over discarded racks and rows of new remaindered records in shops during those years for a ‘possible find’. Yes, they were considered unloved ‘turkeys’, failures, and flops, ‘to clear’ material. Well Cecilia has done the work for those, short of time -today. Those that love to dip into strange things without any effort. Lovely packaged concept albums, pretty step by step education books accompanying them and then, finally given the releases, ‘precious’ titles and covers :like the latest that looks like a badly un-bandaged (whilst wet) plaster model, of a sexual Frankensteiner. Its Kulture for these modern days!
And anyway one prefers a true mezzo sound like that of Pring or Shirley Chapman.
Congratulations, NutDude!
I used to be a fan of Bartoli. Her first Rossini recording – with the red gloves – the Cenerentola, the Idamante on the Levine Idomeneo, were all terrific, but something went wrong along the way. Something that is very telling in how it relates to the current state of opera.
No one could successfully argue that Bartoli possesses many of the skills of a virtuosa singer. Rapid articulation of runs, clean intervalic leaps, great dynamic control, etc. But what her current singing so clearly lacks, what has made her singing unlistenable to me, is the most basic requirement of a singer of 18th-early 20th century art music – a well-supported tone and a fluent legato.
Bartoli’s breath support is now so problematic that she cannot sing a clean legato line without resorting to unsupported head voice. As a result, everything above mp is harsh and stringy. Her recent performances are almost parodies of operatic singing. Overly manipulated dynamics, clucking aspirated coloratura, distortion of even the most simple lines.
Through all this, her basic musical intelligence still shines through. That’s why I cannot dismiss her as an artist. I am still waiting for that early potential to reveal itself.
30. Buster – what opera did Moser sing? Just curious. I’m a BIG fan of her’s her (drag) QOTN for Sawallisch is classic!
She opened her 1997 recital there with three long aria’s by Hasse. The wildest one was from Ruggiero, that I remember, but the other two I am not sure off, I will look up the program.
You sing Hasse yourself, not? Be careful when you take him to Dresden, they are very peculiar about him there.
It’s not Moser (but close perhaps) and it is Hasse but it’s about as far away as one can get from Bartoli and one sings this music nowadays:
http://rapidshare.com/files/301148997/Hasse_aria.mp3
Close to Moser? – then it can only be Simone Kermes. Love her too – same wildness.
37.
Thanks for this info. Moser must have sung one of Leone’s arias – whichw as written for the same castrato who sang Mozart’s Fauno that season.
Yup, have sung quite a fair amount of Hasse. I’ll bare that in mind if I should ever have the (mis)fortune to sing his music in Dresden. (Talking about that, have heard a few really bad live recordings – ranging from thigns done in the 70′s to more recent – that the audience LOVE. So I can’t imagine they like good singing there.)