Cecilia Bartoli - Sings Mozart And Haydn

Starring: Cecilia Bartoli, Concentus Musicus Wien Director: Brian Large Original UK Premiere: 2001 Dvd Release: 2nd February, 2004 Number Of Discs: 2 Format: Anamorphic, Box set, PAL, Widescreen, Region 0 Encoding Subtitled In: English, French, German, Spanish

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The Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli is a popular opera singer & recitalist. She is best-known for her Mozart & Rossini roles as well as for her performances of lesser-known baroque music. In contrast to most opera singers, Bartoli came to prominence at a very young age -- in her early twenties. Bartoli was born in Rome. Her parents were both professional singers & gave her her first music lessons. Her first public performance was at age nine as a shepherd boy in Tosca. Bartoli later studied at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia. In 1985, at age 19, Bartoli appeared in a talent show on Italian television; the conductor Riccardo Muti saw her performance & invited her to audition at La Scala. Several years later, Herbert von Karajan invited her to sing at the 1990 Salzburg Easter Festival. At this time, she also came to Daniel Barenboim s attention when he saw her performing on a French television tribute to Maria Callas. Working with the conductors Barenboim & Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Bartoli focussed on Mozart roles & from then on her career developed internationally.

This 2-DVD set combines previous single-DVD issues featuring mezzo Cecilia Bartoli accompanied by Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting his long-time group, Concentus Music Wien, at the Styriarte Festival in Graz, Austria. And it costs about 25% less than the two DVDs would cost if bought separately. Amazon sells the individual DVDs, if you should want only one or the other, & there are reviews for each of them at their respective product pages. Bartolis singing is so musical, so technically superior that I shant even attempt to talk about it, other than to say that there is no one before the public today who can sing this music any better. Both DVDs contain subtitles in English & audio in either Dolby stereo or surround sound.

The Mozart DVD contains five concert arias . Amazon has not listed them yet; they are Voi avete un cor fedele , Vado, ma dove? Oh Dei! , Giunse alfin il momento - Al desio di chi tadora , Un moto di gioia mi sento , & Bella mia fiamma, addio .

In the latter aria, Bartoli sings some of the most difficult coloratura & chromatic lines ever composed by Mozart. Legend has it that he wrote it as he did to test the soprano Josephine Duschecks vaunted sight-reading ability. She failed the test. Add to this the fact that this is an extraordinarily beautiful & dramatic aria, fully the equal of, say, Or sai che lonore or Come scoglio.

Extras on the Mozart DVD include a complete performance by Harnoncourt & his band of Mozart Symphony No. 38, Prague, as well as thirty minutes of rehearsal footage & a mini-documentary about how the concert was filmed in the lovely baroque hall used by the festival in Graz .

The Haydn disc contains two large pieces for soprano & orchestra, the solo cantata Arianna a Naxos, a 22-minute retelling of the tale of Ariadne abandoned on Naxos before she is rescued by Dionysus . Haydn wrote the cantata for soprano & piano, & never got around to orchestrating it. This performance features a 19th-century string orchestra arrangement by an unknown hand. The second piece, Scena di Berenice, was written by Haydn for Anna Milder & was the model Beethoven took for his better-known concert scena Ah, perfido! The text is taken from Metastasios Antigono & tells a story similar to that of Ariadne: Berenice attempts to come to terms with her loneliness after the death of her lover, Demetrio. Both are sung with incandescence by Bartoli.

Extras on the Haydn DVD: A complete performance of Haydns wonderfully quirky Oxford Symphony, No. 92; fifteen-minutes of rehearsal footage with Harnoncourt & Bartoli; & a mini-documentary about the Styriarte Festival, in the fairy-tale setting of medieval Graz.

This two-DVD set is self-recommending, of course. We are treated to performances by Cecilia Bartoli at the height of her powers. Lovers of baroque music should be ever-grateful that such a prominent diva as Bartoli has recently been devoting herself to music from that era. There is none better. Heartily recommended. DVD I = 115 mins DVD II = 83 mins Scott Morrison

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