“I believe in the power of music, and yes, this music is back! The music of the 18th and 19th century is still a message that can touch us, and I like to share this with the modern audience. There’s this freedom of flying with your instrument and of course you perform this with other musicians and this is a great, great feeling.”
Cecilia Bartoli, ‘La Bartoli’, the versatile Italian coloratura mezzo, who can hit the high notes with the best of sopranos, is talking about the music she does like no-one else, baroque! Or should that be Baroque 'n Roll as her huge fan base treats her like a rock star. Bartoli has sold more than 10 million audio and video recordings worldwide, making her one of the most successful classical artists today. Her list of accolades includes five Grammys, more than 12 Echo Klassik Awards in Germany, and two Classic Brit Awards.
Mezzo with attitude
What’s unusual about Cecilia’s success is that she’s a mezzo, who’s never sung Carmen! (Though she did sing a snatch of Bizet’s opera for an early 90’s TV ad for a Japanese bank.) Instead with her record company Decca who signed her at 19, she’s researched and revived forgotten and neglected byways of 18th and 19th century vocal repertoire repackaged in clever themed album projects with zany marketing.
From her first project, The Vivaldi Album of 1999 when we all discovered the Red Priest had written much more than the ubiquitous Four Seasons through Italian Arias (Gluck), The Salieri Album, Opera Proibita, Maria, Sacrificium, Mission (Agostino Steffani) and St Petersburg, Bartoli has redefined what the mezzo voice can do.
One of her important mentors, Niklaus Harnoncourt , the late period instrument guru said “She has the gift of being instantly recognisable. But it’s also how this voice is used and that’s a matter of intelligence. There are singers with great voices who lack the intelligence to get the best result. Cecilia has everything.”
Her latest album (due out in November) features eye-catching photography of Cecilia naked from the waist up, save for abundant facial hair alla Farinelli, the most famous castrato of the 18th century. It’s a follow-up to her first castrati album of 2009 Sacrificium, which won her the Grammy for Best Classical Vocal Performance (her fifth!)
Initially she says, “I was unsure about the more-than-stubble, then I saw myself and said ‘wow, I look like Johnny Depp — it’s not bad.’”
Cecilia has had to overcome the pre-conception that as a mezzo she would always be a ‘speciality singer’ whilst the sopranos are the real stars. As one of her many mentors and fans Daniel Barenboim said, “from the beginning she knew everything that cannot be taught about music.”
She also has the gift of persuasion. The Met staged its first revival of Rossini’s La Cenerentola with Bartoli in the title role, and Covent Garden revived the Haydn rarity L’anima del Filosofo for its London stage premiere, because she wanted to sing it!
A stage animal, born and bred
Cecilia was almost born on the opera stage and most certainly heard great opera in utero.
Born in Rome, to two professional singers she made her singing debut as the shepherd boy in Tosca. Her parents Silvana Bazzoni, a lyric soprano and her tenor father Pietro Angelo Bartoli, abandoned their solo careers after their children arrived for the relative stability of the Rome Opera Chorus. Cecilia has a younger sister Federica, a stage designer and her late elder brother Gabriele was a professional viola player before he died of cancer in 1997 aged just 35. She’s largely kept her private life out of the public domain. “It’s not something the world needs to know. I don’t want it dramatized into something very sentimental.”
In her teens Cecilia wanted to be a flamenco dancer and also played piano and trumpet. But her mum, recognized her vocal gifts and encouraged her to audition for music school where her main teacher was a tenor. “He was intelligent and never asked me to do things against my mother’s technique.”
Bartoli says she’s always been very careful with her voice. “I made my choices so that I can still be singing today. I only do things when they feel right.” She credits her mum Silvana for helping preserve her voice. As a member of the Rome Opera Chorus she’d seen many promising singers fail to fulfil their potential thanks to commercial and artistic pressures.
TV talent show success and Cecilia Bardi
In 1985 aged 19, Cecilia was ‘discovered’ when she sang on a popular tv talent show called Fantastico. She didn’t win but soon after both Barenboim and Karajan saw her in a ‘live’ TV show from Paris commemorating the 10th anniversary of Callas’s death singing an aria from Rossini’s La Cenerentola.
Barenboim enlisted her for his production of Don Giovanni and she worked with Karajan on a performance of Bach’s B minor Mass, though his death soon after meant it was never performed. Some of her earliest days in Salzburg were captured in a documentary film, Karajan in Salzburg. She was so unknown then that she was mistakenly listed in the credits as Cecilia Bardi.
Luck didn’t always come her way. Auditioning for Glyndebourne she was told they were looking for a ‘Mozartian voice.’ Shortly after she sold 200,000 copies of her own recording of Mozart arias.
Shaping a mezzo career Bartoli style
She began her career conventionally enough singing Rossini and Mozart but soon curiosity had her criss-crossing Europe in search of lost scores in dusty libraries and archives.
“I’ve always enjoyed research, trying to find forgotten music to enlarge the repertoire. Mozart wrote his operas knowing the voices of the singers who would interpret the roles. Today it’s no longer like that. Atonal music creates a barrier between composer and singer so in order to find new music to sing I have to search in the past.”
She spent eight years going and back and forth to St Petersburg “by train or by ship, because I don’t like flying” rummaging through the archives of the Mariinsky Theatre (with the help of Valery Gergiev) looking for scores of the Neapolitan composer Francesco Araja and his successors Hermann Raupach and Domenico Cimarosa at the court of the Tsar for her album St Petersburg.
“It’s a man’s world, but….”
“...here I am right in the middle of it! Ha! I couldn’t believe it when they offered me the Salzburg job” recalls Cecilia, “I mean, my predecessor was Maestro Muti! Of course, it was always a man, and a conductor. I was the first woman and about a hundred years younger than the others.”
Her initial move after taking on Salzburg’s long-weekend Whitsun Festival was to “feature a whole bunch of strong female characters in my programmes. Cleopatra, Norma, Cinderella…” She’s since further “rejuvenated the festival” by staging West Side Story, the first musical staged at “the temple of Classical Music,” also fulfilling her long-held dream of singing Maria, (with a mic by the way for the first time) and it sold out.
Her return to Salzburg as both impresario and star diva brings her career full circle. Recalling how they credited her in the Karajan documentary as ‘ecilia Bardi, she laughs — “now at least they know my name.”
Personality plus
Beyond the powerful branding and glamorous concert gowns, many created for her with corsets that allow her to breathe by English designer Vivienne Westwood, Bartoli’s success is due to her authenticity.
Live on stage, she exudes an infectious ‘joie de vivre’ that’s light years away from the ‘park and bark’ era. She glows in public, her broad smile and animated expressions reaching across to audiences who are not always the rusted-on classical regulars. Many newcomers buy tickets to see her because she is a ‘phenomenon’ — a musical acrobatic who pursues an extreme sport.
At the heart of her work (and she has a tireless work ethic) is her universal gift for story-telling. “With Baroque music,” she says, “you have the sensuality in the music, the energy and the rhythm. I think that’s why so many young people love Baroque music because it’s a nice mix of feelings.”
Mairi Nicolson presents Lunchtime Concert, The Opera Show and Sunday Opera on ABC Classic.
