Cecilia Bartoli – the enchantress casts her spell at the Lucerne Festival

After a couple of years of not hearing La Bartoli live, I was a little apprehensive before her concert at the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre, KKL, after having read Rupert Christiansen's Telegraph review of her concert with Rolando Villazón last December describing her voice as ‘worn and threadbare', having followed her calendar with its many performances of Norma, and having wondered about skipping from West Side Story at Salzburg to Baroque in Lucerne in just one week. There was no need for concern. As soon as her first notes rang out you knew you were in for one of those marvellous, memorable Bartoli rollercoaster rides.

It was all there: the range, the breath control, the unified vocal registers, the trill, the extreme coloratura and the spine-tingling intensity. She is a marvel to have arrived at 50 without her voice having snapped in two, roaming from mezzo turf into soprano territory without stepping on the landmines that have wrecked the attempts of many of her illustrious colleagues of the past… and present.

Famously, it is not a big voice, which presumably reduces the stress on the vocal chords, but with the generosity of her programmes, both in length and content– who can forget the Sacrificium concerts with their stunning vocal feats – it is a wonder that she can still whip up a storm as she did in Lucerne's 1,900-seater hall.

The first part was mainly Vivaldi, some from her Vivaldi Album, the disc which changed the history of recorded music. It generated massive sales both for the disc and for the ensuing promotional tour. The phenomenon was something previously associated with pop stars, yet has now become common practice for opera singers too. The album was issued nearly twenty years ago and has sold almost a million copies… for a disc of baroque music! Over the last two decades Bartoli has continued the practice, leading up to her latest album, St Petersburg, with its “baroque musical treasures of Tsarist Russia”, and it was this repertoire which made up most of the second half of her programme.

The high-wire parts of the evening saw her returning to old favourites such as Vivaldi's Agitata da due venti and Nicola Porpora's Nobil onda, though with some arresting changes of tempi and decoration under the dramatic baton of Diego Fasolis with his magnificent I Barocchisti. There was some camp fun as she walked in, while the orchestra played a march by Hermann Raupach, wearing a white dress and long train whose end was still offstage as she reached the podium. The train was detached and it slithered offstage like a snake as she launched into two Raupach arias (from St Petersburg) to lead into the interval. It must be something about Raupach that inspires theatricality because for her final encore, Razverzi pyos gortani, laya from his opera Alceste, written to a Russian libretto, she strode on, in her slightly tom-boyish way, wearing a (fake) white mink hat and muff, part of her look for the cd. There was more fun and games during her first encore, Steffani's A facile vittoria during her ‘duel' with the trumpet: turning through 360° while singing, taking a handkerchief proffered by Fasolis to wipe away her tears, threatening to return to the green room when the trumpeter executed a particularly fiendish passage. One unscripted theatrical moment came when a loud ricochet interrupted a quiet moment as the lute lost a string; if he mentally yelled “s@*t!”, nothing troubled his calm expression. This was Bartoli the showman, the clown, the girl-next-door which the audience loves.

However, the moments when Cecilia Bartoli is without equal are when she bewitches her audience with blazingly intense and powerful accounts of slow, legato arias about beauty and tranquillity (Vivaldi's Sovvente il sole) or death and heartbreak (Vivaldi's Gelido in ogni vena). Two thousand souls, in absolute silence, enchanted and transported to a very special place which only Bartoli, and a handful of others, know how to reach.

Programme

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Farnace (1727)
Overture
[Allegro] – Andante – Allegro

Ottone in Villa (1713)
Gelosia, tu già rendi l'alma mia

Orlando furioso (1727)
Sol da te, mio dolce amore

Griselda (1735)
Agitata da due venti

Concerto alla rustica (c.1727)
Allegro – Adagio – Allegro

Farnace
Gelido in ogni vena

Giustino (1724)
Sventurata navicella

Hermann Raupach (1728-1778)

Alceste ( 1758)
March
ldu na smert

Siroe, re di Persia ( 1760)
O placido il mare

Interval

Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785)

lphigenia in Tauride (1768)
Ouverture

Francesco Domenico Araia (1709-1770)

Seleuco (1744)
Pastor che a notte ombrosa

Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783)

La clemenza di Tito (1727)
Overture
Se mai senti spirarti sul volto
Vò disperato a morte

Francesco Domenico Araia

Bellerofonte (1750)
Overture

Nicola Porpora (1686-1768)

Adelaide (1723)
Nobil onda

Encores

Agostino Steffani (1655-1728)

Tassilone
A facile vittoria

Antonio Vivaldi

Andromeda liberata (1726)
Sovvente il sole

Hermann Raupach

Alceste
Razverzi pyos gortani, laya

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.