Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site
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Page This family-friendly site celebrates Italian culture for the enjoyment of children and
adults. Site-Overview
She is incredibly driven in her career as a recording artist and
performer, challenging her voice to attain the maximum she can from
it. Her career is also expertly handled by her recording
company, Decca Records, which from the start strove to create a
unique brand for Bartoli. Some call her a diva, others a
rock-star classical singer. This professional drive could be the reason you hear nothing
much about her personal life. She spends any free time, not much,
with her family and close friends from childhood. However,
there does seem to be an fiancé in the picture, the Swiss Opera
singer Oliver Widmer. But I'm not here to gossip. I want to introduce you to the voice and
performance artistry of Cecilia Bartoli... She is noted for her warm tone and the beautiful lyric quality of
her voice, making her especially suited to compositions by the
lyrical composer Rossini, and by Mozart. She has recorded
albums of works by Haydn, Puccini, Mozart, Rossini, Handel, Bellini,
Gluck, Vivaldi. In this video you can hear Bartoli's voice best in a Rossini duet that
she sings with a pure soprano, Luba Organasova. You can hear
her lower range and warmer tone and coloratura skills, balanced
wonderfully with the higher and lighter notes and tone of the
soprano. Bartoni is fond of researching the music of the baroque period and
early classical music, and resurrecting the work she finds best
suited to her voice. The research has produced some unusual
CDs and concert tours:
Opera Proibita which features oratoria once forbidden by the
Vatican, The Salieri Album featuring the work by the long overlooked Salieri, a contemporary of Mozart, She has dedicated time to researching compositions from the Bel
Canto era, and to recording Italian traditional music, too.
And this beautiful Ave Maria. Bartoli's mother was also her trainer (along with the Conservatorio di
Santa Cecilia in Rome), source of her native talent (along with her
father, also an opera singer), and
her inspiration for success, as can be seen from this lovely video.
Bartoli studied flamenco dancing, trumpet and piano before training her
voice as a coloratura opera singer, a mezzo soprano. She began
serious training when she was 16. To hear her speak of her
history in her own words, you can listen to this wonderful interview
from BBC Radio.
She has a very animated manner of singing, with her face making,
by now famous, expressions that change continually. But not
only her face is expressive, her body is too. When I gave
neighbors a video of a concert, the husband appreciated the bursting
bodice throughout, much more than his wife did. Bartoli's
weight varies over her career, as does the line of the front of her
dresses, so at times there is quite a show going on for those
interested. Her animation is best suited to a concert hall, so
videos with lots of close-ups can be distracting, to say the least.
Here is a video, mild in both the facial expressions and busty
distractions, of Vivaldi's beautifully
delicate Domine Deus. Lately, Bartoli has been becoming more and more interested in
Early Music, or Old Music, very early classical music. She
works closely with Early Music Orchestras, like Il Giardino Armonico.
Il Giardino Armonico accompany Bartoli in this 6 part documentary
about her work to revive Vivaldi's long neglected operatic works
that were written for castrati, castrated boys, who grew to manhood
with high-pitched voices, and were trained from childhood to expand
their breathing and high range. Bartoli performs the castrati
singing roles.
If you have the chance to see Cecilia Bartoli in concert, be
prepared for the large number of groupie-like fans who adore not
just her voice, but everything about her. I must admit I
prefer to listen to her music on CDs, so I am not distracted by her
exaggerated facial expressions and body movements. Her musical
curiosity is prodigious, her talent growing, her dedication to her
craft amazing. She well deserves all the accolades.
Visit Cecilia Bartoli's Amazon Store
Cecilia
Bartoli, Italian Mezzo-Soprano Superstar
Rome native, Cecilia Bartoli (b.1966), is a best-selling, generally
sold-out concert and operatic performer. In the classical
music genre, her CDs are second in popularity only to Pavarotti's.
Bartoli's voice is classed as mezzo-soprano, which
means she has a slightly lower range than a pure soprano. And
she is considered a master of coloratura, which is the ability to
trill the notes.
