Ravioli Bartoli
Connoisseurs of singing
rarely hold moderate opinions, and there is hardly a singer who elicits more
adulation and disapproval at the same time than mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli,
who opens Oct. 16 in a new, made-to-order production of Rossini's La
Cenerentola at the Metropolitan Opera.
Bartoli
is more than a singer: She is a marvel of marketing. She sells out any house
she appears in and moves enough CDs to qualify as a pop star--1.3 million since
her first recording appeared in 1988. Her recordings outsell those of every
other classical artist except Luciano Pavarotti. At 31, she has already had
more ad hoc laurels lavished on her than many legends receive even
posthumously. A chef in a San Francisco restaurant has created "Ravioli
Bartoli." One of the Chunnel trains that link England and France is called the
"Cecilia Bartoli." There is a spate of worshipful Web sites devoted to her, and
a breathless and wildly premature biography by Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal,
Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song , which describes her as "a
sensuous, embodied angel, standing quietly on a concert stage as she report[s]
back to God about the mysterious joys and sorrows of human existence." Another
book about Bartoli and her contemporaries is being written by Manuela
Hoelterhoff, the former opera critic of the Wall Street Journal , who is
now a member of its editorial board.
Does Bartoli live up to the hype? She is certainly a fine
technician who never sacrifices passion to precision. Listen to her
roulades--virtuosic runs of notes on a single syllable--and you'll hear each
note as a distinct link in a long, twirling chain and each word being accorded
its proper weight. Her new CD, An Italian Songbook , for instance, opens
with one of dozens of settings Rossini made of two short verses by the
18 th -century poet Pietro Metastasio, "Mi lagnerò tacendo" ("I will
complain silently"). It is a jovial anthology of trills, runs, grace notes,
mordents, and melismas, with a section of operatic recrimination. Bartoli
finesses the tension between glum words and sprightly notes right up to the
end, when the music's exuberance finally overwhelms self-pity.
Bartoli's
critics have argued that her voice is too petite to reach the outer spaces of
the cathedral-like Met and that her repertoire is too narrow, fusty, and
obscure. She has sung no more than a handful of operatic roles onstage, mostly
Mozart and Rossini, and she has made a specialty of the songs that kept Rossini
busy after his opera-composing career had ended. Bartoli's style of fussing
over every syllable has been called twitchy, belabored, and self-consciously
adorable. Critics also draw ominous comparisons to Kathleen Battle, the soprano
whose gifts have been eroded in recent years by an uncontrollable tendency to
simper. Like Battle, Bartoli has allowed her stage manner to become downright
weird. On the video of her Houston Cenerentola , from 1995, her eyes pop
out, her dimples deepen, her chin recedes unflatteringly against her neck, her
head springs forward and back from her shoulders as if she were doing the Funky
Chicken. Bartoli does not have a diva's sense of dignity.
After years of disarming girl-next-door
normalcy, however, Bartoli may have begun indulging in the clichés of diva
naughtiness, such as a habit of canceling appearances, including a
much-publicized Battle-like spat with the Metropolitan Opera's general manager,
Joseph Volpe. Bartoli has consistently said she is just protecting her health.
Hoelterhoff recently told the New York Times that at least some of the
cancellations had to do with the condition of Bartoli's brother Gabriele, who
has had surgery for a brain tumor.
There is
a certain irony to the accusation that Bartoli's voice and repertoire lack
substance. Bartoli has said that she finds the wry humor of the 18 th
century more modern than the grandiloquence of Verdi and Puccini. Her voice
matches her sensibility: It is better suited to the human-scaled works she
sings than to the colossal operas that today's colossal houses were built for.
Opera houses have long been designed to be one-size-fits-all, but Rossini's
domestic comedies inevitably seem dwarfed by a stage ample enough to contain
the struggles in Wagner's Valhalla. It is not Bartoli's voice but the operas
themselves that are too small for houses like the Met--or rather, the Met is
too big for all but the grandest of grand opera. Under James Levine, the Met
has barely dabbled in bel canto, the finespun singer vehicles of the early
19 th century, favoring instead the titans of opera. If La
Cenerentola --Rossini's version of the Cinderella story--has made it to the
Met for the first time in the company's history, it is only because Bartoli
brought it there.
For now, people seem willing to allow Bartoli to perform
repertoire that would otherwise seem destined for the remainder bin. She has
championed the music of Pauline Viardot-Garcia, herself a Rossini mezzo-soprano
in the 19 th century, and led a campaign to rehabilitate Haydn's
almost-mythological cantata Arianna a Naxos and his virtually unknown
opera Orfeo ed Euridice . One reason she can get away with this is that
she is a dazzlingly expressive singer, guiding the listener through the
emotional landscape of a piece with every small push of her voice. She colors
the first recitative in her recording of Haydn's Orfeo ed Euridice with
more brilliant hues of grief than I've ever heard before. "Sventurata! "
she cries ("Unhappy me!") in a voice full of pain. "A thousand dismal
thoughts"--her tone darkens--"constantly cloud my mind," and the notes acquire
a ravishing mistiness that is partly unsung air.
To my
mind, Bartoli's breathiness is central to her appeal. She can command a full,
chesty holler when she needs to, but in quiet passages she tends to produce a
gentle haze of breath around each focused note. This hiss, the noise level in
her voice, like Glenn Gould's humming as he played the piano or the squeaking
of Andrés Segovia's fingers on the strings of his guitar, makes her unusual
today, when most singers are trained in the discipline of steely perfection and
when our ears have become accustomed to the sharp-edged sounds of a compact
disc, surrounded by undiluted digital silence. It is as if, by this deliberate
smudging, Bartoli were giving old songs an antique timbre.
Bartoli's effort to cast herself as an
anti-diva, at least in her stage performances, has worked. Some critics were
scandalized, but more were charmed, when she made her Met debut two seasons ago
as Despina, the servant girl and fifth wheel to four malicious and befuddled
lovers in Mozart's Così fan tutte . She did not enter down a curving
staircase, but rather toting a house on a rope like a barge--and made it
immediately clear that she was carrying the whole production.
Bartoli is a wildly popular
singer of relatively unpopular music, a singer who could probably fill
stadiums, but prefers to keep her audiences at close quarters. Last year, she
opted to give a recital in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, rather than in
the larger Avery Fisher Hall (to the chagrin of the presenter). She has been
leaning on the Met to find a more intimate venue for her projects. She has
gravitated toward the stripped-down aesthetic of original-instrument ensembles.
While Pavarotti and his two sidekick tenors have been turning opera into a
mass-appeal juggernaut, Bartoli has been trying to shrink a bloated genre.
That's the effort for which she really deserves megastardom.
