TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121492/1214440.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.9 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 63

Opera's Roman Candle


Newcomer Cecilia Bartoli lights up the stage with her dark good
looks, her youthful verve and, above all, her splendiferous
coloratura

By MARTHA DUFFY - With reporting Nancy Newman/New York


    You might hear her first on the radio, as you're spinning
along in a car perhaps. The composer might well be Rossini, and
it won't be long before some hummingbird scales and trills fly
by. The song continues and bursts into fantastic runs up and
down the octaves. Wait a minute, you say, as it becomes clear
that this is not just another exercise in bloodless bel canto.
The voice you are hearing is fresh and juicy. This singer can
make the trills tease, the roulades flirt. She tosses off
cruelly difficult music as naturally as if she were chatting on
the car phone.

    She is Cecilia Bartoli, a stylish Roman of 26 who is a rare
creature in the musical world: a coloratura mezzo. The
coloratura refers to her extravagant ease with ornamentation;
the mezzo gives her a lush tone, darker than a soprano's, and
keeps her from ever -- perish the thought -- squeaking. "I have a
natural facility for the coloratura," she says. "It was born in
here," she adds, pointing to her chest.

    Bartoli is right that no amount of coaching can create a
voice like hers; one must be born with the raw material. But
she was born with more than that. Her dark good looks project
grandly across the footlights: a mane of lustrous hair, huge
brown eyes, a generous mouth and milky shoulders that enhance a
decolletage. She also has temperamental stability and a ready
sense of humor. Says conductor James Levine, artistic director
of the Metropolitan Opera: "She has extraordinary
self-perception, without the narcissism and the rest of the
baloney." She will need her level-headedness as her
international career, already robust, continues to expand.
Everyone wants Bartoli.

    The list of who got there early is impressive. For her,
there were no years on the slow track, working in small
European houses. Instead she was launched by TV, on a show
called Fantastico. Managers began calling, and she made her
operatic debut in The Barber of Seville in Rome. It was an
unusual instance where the singer was the same age as the
insouciant heroine. "When I sang Rosina at 20," she says, "I
knew I felt like Rosina." In 1987 she appeared on French TV in
a tribute to Maria Callas, reeling off the finale of La
Cenerentola, roughly the vocal equivalent of a Grucci fireworks
extravaganza. The major maestros had apparently tuned in. Daniel
Barenboim began working with her at once. "She had wonderful
expressive qualities, and her vocalizing was very advanced," he
recalls.

    Another listener was the late Herbert von Karajan, who
asked her to sing some Bach at the Salzburg Easter Festival.
The conductor died before the performances, but she treasures
the experience of rehearsing with him. "Bach was another world
to me," she says. "At the beginning I was always in a rush.
Karajan taught me to take the tempo tranquilly, to take a
breath. This is something I use for everything." To those names,
add Sir Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Chailly -- a stellar
fan club.

    Bartoli comes from a musical family. Both parents sang at
the Rome Opera -- her mother a lyric soprano, her father a
dramatic tenor. Her mother Silvana is Cecilia's one and only
voice teacher. "She initiated it so slowly and carefully that I
wasn't aware of it at first," says the daughter, who also
detoured through girlhood enthusiasms for flamenco dancing and
the trombone. "The voice," Silvana instructed Cecilia, "must
come out naturally, no rigidity or tension -- like yawning."
The family is very close, and Cecilia credits her realistic view
of the rarefied opera world to her parents' unawed support.

    If TV opened the way for Bartoli, her reputation has grown
worldwide because of her five solo CDs -- mostly of Rossini and
Mozart but also including Vivaldi and Scarlatti. Her
just-released CD, If You Love Me, a group of giddy 18th century
Italian songs, now tops the classical charts. Not until 1994
and after will her opera career come to full fruition, given
the enormous lead time that productions now require.

    Her albums capture the qualities that make her recitals
sellout events. Bartoli grabs the audience. She sings with her
eyes too. In Rossini, who has lavish comic zest, she courts the
phrases and the audience as well. She displays, as Levine says,
"an exceptional instrument, personality, grasp of the music and
the text and, most of all, the ability to communicate all this."

    What comes next for this young virtuoso? The opera schedule
is daunting: The Barber in Houston next spring, her American
debut; Don Giovanni in a heavyweight Salzburg production
conducted by Barenboim in 1994; the Met's Cosi fan tutte the
following season. Bartoli is happily caught up in her repertory,
but her fans, as well as many opera managers, already ache to
see her expand it. Why not the big-money operas -- Verdi and,
above all, Carmen?

    Of Verdi, Bartoli says, "Never!" Carmen has been offered by
several houses and turned down -- at least until she is in her
30s. The wise men who hover over her career, like Barenboim and
Levine, hope she sticks to her resolve. The fact is that, lovely
as her voice is, it is not large. But 26 is very young. It is
nearly impossible to predict how a voice will develop; the
supreme Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad sang operetta in her 20s.
"You must never force," Bartoli insists. "The test is after the
concert: Is the voice still fresh so that you could go on and
on?" She certainly passed the test with Levine. When she
auditioned for him, he let the session run on and on. He was
having that much fun listening to her sing.