|
RECITAL REVIEW
February 15, 2004
|
By Stephanie Friedman
Cecilia Bartoli has fun when she works: she has fun with her own vocal
dexterity; she has fun with her accompanist (smiles were exchanged more
than once in Sunday's recital at Zellerbach Hall); she has fun with her
audience and of course with her comic songs. Comedy — a very serious
concept to those who work as hard as she does — is the essence of
Cecilia Bartoli's performances. But like the Marcel Marceau skit of the
man with the rapidly alternating tragedy and comedy masks, Bartoli
proves that the profound sadness of a sad song is simply the reverse of
the ecstatic joy and bubbliness of a light-hearted one. The same font
of artistic delirium within her feeds both extremes of emotion.
In a program that mined these contrasts, and accompanied by the
extraordinarily sensitive pianist Sergio Ciomei, who seemed delighted
with his assignment, Bartoli beguilingly and authoritatively clowned,
soared, and vocally “tatted” her way through more than two hours of
Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Berlioz, Delibes, and Pauline Viardot
songs and arias, singing in Italian, French and Spanish.
The vocal effects Bartoli uses in performance are so much a part of her
that it seems beside the point to critique her in the usual terms of
technique, style, stage deportment, and the like. True, she presses
hard against her voice at times, coarsening the tone, but she always
knows what she wants, and it works. Hers is a voice that responds to
every nuance of emotion, happy or sad, and inhabits every bit of music
contained in every syllable and every note. Her singing of the word
“Cangió” (has changed), in Cinderella's famous aria from
Rossini's La Cenerentola, “Naqui all'affanno e al pianto” (I
was born to suffering and to tears), somehow epitomized her
transformation; “figlia” (daughter), from the same aria, mirrored that
transformation through a transcendent attachment to the pitch and a
ravishing shift of tonal color.
Bartoli's face and body are likewise free to respond, from her eyebrows to her fingertips. Her work is so intense that at times it is almost painful to watch and listen as she maneuvers her way, like a “song stylist,” through an aria like Handel's “Lascia ch'io pianga” (Let me weep), one of her four encores, her mouth a grimace of suffering, her voice alternately retracting and pulsing. But her musical values are unerring, and in spite of reservations about the interpretation (couldn't she please sing a line straight?), when she has accomplished it, it is difficult to see how the aria could be done any other way. Of course it can be, but so persuasive is Bartoli, so enthralling are her wreathings and writhings, that we must accompany her; and we are, in the end, won over. Occasionally her propensity for what seems almost exaggerated feeling steers her wrong. In Bizet's “Les adieux de l'hôtesse arabe” (Farewell of the Arabian Hostess), the slow, dance-like languor of the piano accompaniment and the sinuous vocal line call for a knowing hostess whose blandishments are subtle and whose charms are hidden behind a (figurative) veil, rather than Bartoli's anguished hostess, who really wanted that handsome stranger, and who pined like a schoolgirl for “the one that got away.” But, as with the Handel aria, even when Bartoli misses the mark her commitment is persuasive. For all the opulence of her vocal gifts, Bartoli generally shuns that opulence and works in miniature, prefering to limn minute details of emotion and vocal expression rather than hew to the long line. In Bizet's “Tarantelle,” for example, the exuberance of the repeated exclamations of “ah, ah, la, la!” gives way musically at a certain point to a more thoughtful, weighty, poetic sea imagery — ”Le flot est rapide et changeant / Toujours sillonnant l'eau profonde” (The billow is swift and changing / forever ploughing the deep wave). The piano roils majestically in full swirling motion, and the voice might reasonably follow suit. But Bartoli resisted the call for the long-lined legato that would have brought some variety to her usual seizing of small details, if not some relief. She seems to choose, or need, to address the music and her own prodigious vocalisms with either an almost tortured intensity or a girlish coquetry. Neither bespeaks a need for the long line. And yet, in the final encore of the afternoon, de Curtis' “Non ti scordar di me” (Don't forget me), the first few notes of the song poured out with a welcome, even startling fullness of tone unlike any she had produced in the preceding two hours. In truth, Bartoli has many voices. She can choose which to use at any time, putting aside her thrilling, rapid vibrato to produce a fully supported and phonated tone senza vibrato as she did, to give only one example, in Viardot's lament, “Hai Luli.” She can pinch her voice, as in Bizet's “La coccinelle” (The ladybug), when she sang in a little bug-like voice. (A little over the top, that, I thought — it could have been done less exaggeratedly, and through intent rather than gimmick. But she does love to mimic.) She can swoop and dive like a great sea-bird; beat out the divisions of a Rossini aria through repeated glottal articulations and chin juttings; pull back her tone for pinpoint expressivity or let it out in ravishing beauty and glory. That she effects these contrasts with rapid-fire oscillations is what makes her so much more than simply a dazzling coloratura mezzo. It puts her in a class by herself. It also points up the truth that a vocal performer triumphs when she (or he) delivers the heart and soul of the living human being up there on the stage.
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
|
Cecilia Bartoli){kind=small}