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Bartoli Again Makes Foray Into Rare Music
When Cecilia Bartoli sings, notes don't just float out of her mouth. Her body shakes during her coloratura fireworks, as if each sound bubbled up, like lava escaping a volcano.
She returned to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night as part of her tour backing her new recording, "Opera Proibita," a recording of works by Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara and George Frideric Handel that were forbidden to be performed according to a 1701 ruling by Pope Clement XI.
Dressed in a green gown and with a matching hair clip, her eyes bulged during the coloratura, and she seemed on the verge of tears as her eyebrows arched during the legato sections of lament. During breaks in the performance, backed by the Orchestra La Scintilla of Zurich Opera, the audience responded with cheers, hoots, even foot stomps × old-time diva worship at its best.
Bartoli has taken an unusual path in recent years, spending only some of her time on the popular works of Mozart and Rossini that initially brought her fame. Her recordings of Vivaldi (1999), Gluck (2001) and Salieri (2003) became best-sellers, and the first two won Grammys. Her latest debuted on the U.S. classical chart at No. 1.
Many of the songs on those recordings had disappeared from the performance scene and were unearthed from libraries. The 39-year-old mezzo-soprano first got the idea to record early Handel about 2 1/2 years ago when she performed a Handel oratorio.
"I wanted to learn a little bit more about the young Handel because he composed this music when he was 21," the Rome native said last month after arriving from Europe by ship. "Then I decided to do research with a musicologist, and we found out that Handel arrived in Rome at the beginning of the 18th century. The musicians that were really active in Rome were Scarlatti and Caldara, and of course (Arcangelo) Corelli, too."
"And I decided I wanted to go through this music to the oratorios of these people and find our why they wrote oratorios. And then I discovered opera was prohibited, the Vatican decided to ban opera and also to ban women from signing. Cardinals who liked opera, cardinals like Pietro Ottoboni, they found a way to escape this Vatican decision by writing themselves libretti with sacred text, text from the Bible and from allegorical things. The music is full of passion, drama, sensuality, energy and wit."
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