Now this has got to be great. Well, it really does
have to be, doesn’t it! Cecilia Bartoli, fabulous Cecilia Bartoli, with
those deep, dark eyes riveting you from the cover (but classically draped
to match the subject, a far cry from the days when her selling-point
was her motor-bike leather and, yes, I confess it, I looked back over
my shoulder with the rest of them when I saw her poster on the billboards).
This is classical music’s hottest young female singer and there’s nothing
I or any other critic can say to convince you otherwise. The question
is, do I want to?
Now, to take a more down-to-earth line, let’s start
with the programme. And we’ve got to admire her for putting her clout
behind a record of Gluck, and a record of Gluck without an Orfeo
or an Alceste in sight. This is all pre-reform, Italian-period
Gluck, to texts by Metastasio, and six out of eight are claimed as first
recordings (how extraordinary, in this age of rediscoveries, that so
many Gluck operas have remained buried). As a publicity ploy, this might
pay off, and it deserves to; and if it does, Gluck will benefit as much
as Bartoli, so let’s admit that it shows a real love of music to do
this.
A love shared, I would say, by all concerned. I daresay
sales would have been much the same with a scrappy booklet and no texts,
but we get a handsome hardcover book which, though small, would grace
any coffee table. In thick, glossy paper, old-style lettering and artificially
yellowing pages (but hey, this is a disc that’s meant to last, what
colour will this paper be when it’s really old?), it carries
a thorough essay by Claudio Osele plus full texts in four languages,
reproductions of contemporary paintings and engravings and, slipped
delicately into the back of it, an afterthought as it were, is the little
matter of the disc itself.
Another aspect is the time and care that must have
gone into the accompaniments. The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
are a very high class early-instrument group. All too many early instrument
groups these days have become so proficient at their job, and so eager
to expunge memories of the time when early instruments just sounded
like bad instruments badly played, that their one desire in life seems
to be to persuade listeners that they are not really playing old instruments
at all, so where’s the point of it? The Berlin group combine a clear
relish of the piquant timbres of their instruments and the "unusual"
(to our ears) orchestral balances that emerge, with an absolute precision
of intonation and ensemble and a real rapport with the singer. And all
this, look you, with a leader not a conductor, and this surely means
real rehearsals and real musicianship from singer and players alike,
when a hard-boiled professional band under a hack conductor could have
sightread the accompaniments on the spot.
No doubt all these extras will be covered by the sales
of the record, but when we think of all the cost-cutting that could
have gone on without adverse effect on the economic return we can only
be thankful that there are still people in high places who care about
these things, and one’s eye lights on the well-respected name of Christopher
Raeburn as producer and suspects he might have had something to do with
it.
So on to the Bartoli phenomenon itself, and phenomenon
it is. She has been criticised in the past for two things in particular:
her aspirates and her vibrato. Regarding the aspirates I can give her
a clean bill of health; her brilliant passage-work is all crystal clear
without a trace of an unwanted "h" anywhere. And not long
ago I was listening to a bass "hahaha-ing" his way through
the Bach Christmas Oratorio so I’m the first to protest at an aspirate
when I hear one. I also note less of the breathy, little-girl eagerness
which used to be a mannerism. Is she growing up?
About the vibrato, I laid into her contribution to
the recent recording of Rossini’s Le nozze di Teti (DECCA
466 328-2) pretty unceremoniously. I don’t know if those sessions
were particularly fraught, or whether she was having a bad day, but
here I find that, though the thing is pushed continually to the brink,
it does seem to be under deliberate control. I also find that it is
part and parcel of her artfully feminine way of keeping us guessing
(this is one aspect of the Bartoli phenomenon). Will the next phrase
come out schoolgirlishly "straight" and pure, or will she
turn on the full vibrato? If you want to hear her absolutely tearing
passion to tatters, and apparently the voice with it, go to Vitellia’s
aria "Ah, taci" from La Clemenza di Tito. But then
turn to the piece from La Semiramide riconosciuta and its plentiful
trills allow us to study what she means by a trill and what she means
by vibrato. If the rapid oscillation is between two recognisable notes,
that is to say a semitone or a tone apart, then it’s a trill. If it’s
between something much smaller then it’s vibrato. But the technique
is the same. It’s not the same thing as the natural vibrations of a
voice which is not making a deliberate vibrato but simply resonating
freely. And it is emphatically not the tremor, all too easily disguised
as vibrato but ending up as sheer squalliness, of a voice which lacks
proper breath-support. If Bartoli lacked that essential, she just couldn’t
hold the long, high lines as she does in many of the slow arias. So
the vibrato is a deliberate part of her vocal production and we have
to take it as part of the phenomenon.
Another of her mysteries is, is she really a soprano
or a mezzo? Logic would say that, when she can hold a high, pure line
going up to an effortless top B, as she does in Sesto’s aria from Clemenza,
when her coloratura sometimes goes higher and when the general tessitura
of the pieces is that of a soprano, albeit one able to descend below
middle C from time to time, then she must be a soprano. But then her
middle register assumes a contralto-like richness which enables her
to move downwards without recourse to chest tones (any soprano can do
a Marlene Dietrich imitation if she wants to). On the other hand, she
can also take her chest voice up remarkably high. And these are all
things which denote a mezzo-soprano. So she remains individual, elusive
and, above all fascinating.
She is also a singer of our time. It is said that those
who hear her live find her voice disappointingly small. I can’t speak
of this from experience but even if it were so, I don’t know if this
necessarily disqualifies her as a great singer in a loudspeaker dominated
age; the important thing is that the results coming out of the loudspeaker
are those intended and that they reach the public they are aimed at.
And ever since the gramophone was invented there have been singers (famously
Peter Dawson) who were essentially gramophone singers and others (in
the post-war years, Leyla Gencer and Raina Kabaivanska) whose voices
recorded badly and were in fact recorded very little. The recitative
to the Ezio piece seems to me pure "microphone singing"
and would hardly come across the footlights live (I presume she gives
it more sound in public?). But when the object is to make a recording,
and when it succeeds on these terms, does this matter?
It occurs to me that I haven’t said anything about
Gluck himself. The notes begin by quoting him as stating, in the preface
to the first real "reform" opera, Alceste, "I
have made every effort to restore music to its true role of serving
the poetry by means of its powers of expression". Cynics always
did say that this stemmed from a recognition that his music was not
of itself sufficiently strong in personality to hold the stage except
in tandem with the librettist. Here, some years before his "reform",
his music forms a perfect vehicle for the singer to go through the whole
gamut of the characters’ emotions. It is all totally effective (I thought
only that the Semiramide aria was banal; the notes attribute
an ironic sense to this. Unfortunately, irony in music tends not to
outlive the age it was written for). At the end I found I remembered
the moods, which are clearly delineated and well-varied, and the general
experience, rather than any particular phrase, but this is not incoherent
with Gluck’s intentions. Maybe the music will lodge itself in my memory
on rehearing it (I shall certainly do so). Even so, my appetite is whetted
to hear these unrecorded operas complete.
I think no one will remain indifferent to this disc.
It is an absolutely involving experience by one of the phenomena of
our times.
Christopher Howell
Cecilia Bartoli (mezzo
soprano), Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Bernhard Forck (leader)