Hallo,
hör mal in die CD von Celina Bartoli rein: Opera Proibita.
Und wie bringst du das mit Beethoven in Einklang?
Das ist was für Barock- und Rokoko-Fans.
Gruß
Barney
PS:
Etwas zum Nachdenken (damals kopiert aus: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/):
DIVA DRESS-UP TIME FOR BARTOLI
It’s just silly to tart up a great singer with an album concept as thin as this one, writes ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Some bad ideas begin as good ones that someone spoils by pushing them too far.
”Opera Proibita”, the new recording by Cecilia Bartoli, is a good example.
Okay, maybe I’m going too far myself. Bartoli has one of the great voices of our time, and she’s a smart, imaginative musician. Any recording from her can’t be a bad idea, no matter how dubious the concept or desperate the marketing. Bartoli excels in repertoire that’s off the narrow track followed by most singers of her stature. She’s been guided in part by her rich and nimble mezzo-soprano, which is better suited to opera seria, the reigning genre of the 18th and early 19th centuries, than to most of what came later.
The music on the new disc is very much in line with the expeditionary recordings Bartoli has been making since her career began almost 20 years ago. It consists of 15 little-known arias by Haendel, Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara, all of whom happened to be in Rome during a period (from about 1698 to 1710) when two successive popes used a variety of excuses to prevent staged performances from happening in the city.
There’s no evidence that any of these composers were inconvenienced by the Vatican’s anti-theatre shenanigans. All were free to come and go, and Handel even finished a new opera for Florence during his very brief Roman residency. For his Roman patrons, he did what the others did: He wrote oratorios, which, as any Messiah fan will tell you, can be just as dramatic as any opera.
Nonetheless, Bartoli and her producer Christopher Raeburn, who did an album of Salieri’s music two years ago, have seized on the papal ban as a way of juicing up what could otherwise have been a hard sell. Bartoli Sings Excerpts From Obscure Italian Oratorios has much less pizzazz than Opera Proibita (Forbidden Opera). The title itself almost counts as bait-and-switch. It’s literally false, since there are no opera arias on the disc. It only makes sense if you think of the oratorios as furtive operas, written with sacred themes
but otherwise flaunting the composers’ dramatic instincts under the nose of authority.
Okay; but composers in that period focused on pleasing their patrons, not on waging a titanic personal struggle to give voice to music that perhaps only God could appreciate (that came later, with Beethoven). Caldara composed oratorios when operas were not allowed, but he also wrote them when opera was permitted again. Like Haendel, when Roman theatres were off-limits, Caldara and Scarlatti sent their operas to other cities.
The thinness of the conceit may have prompted Raeburn and Decca to look for another, more visual anchor for this project. They found it, oddly enough, in Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce vita. Images from the movie decorate the CD booklet, which also features photos of Bartoli vamping in front of cinema stills, while wearing Vivienne Westwood outfits modelled on Anita Ekberg’s costumes in the film. Two comparative shots of Ekberg prove that Westwood, at least, knew what she was doing.
Why La Dolce vita? Because, we are told, Fellini made passing reference to Baroque art when discussing his film, and because the movie contains such appealing images of the city. „The music of these oratorios will transport us back to the life behind the architecture which Fellini portrayed so magically in his films,“ says an uncredited note, by a writer clearly straining to demonstrate pertinence where none exists.
„Everything I’ve learned from living in Rome,“ Bartoli says in a brief Decca interview, „whether looking out across the city from the top of the Gianicolo Hill or walking through the centre, I find in this music.“ This sounds more credible, if only because Bartoli is a native Roman. But none of her chosen composers was. The German-born Haendel’s connection with Italian music was real and powerful, but his connection with Rome was limited to a couple of visits of only a few months each.
The recordings themselves, with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre, show Bartoli’s customary verve and technical assurance. She’s still terrific at mustering the kind of martial vigour composers of her period demanded when heroic doings were afoot. She also has a tender way with a lament, though the most melancholic adagio on the disc is actually an aria by Scarlatti in which the character is luxuriating in a flower bed. Bartoli’s coloratura is as fearless as ever, and her choice of arias such as the lovely Vanne pentita a piangere will no doubt make Caldara’s music a thousand times better known than it was last month.
But Bartoli does herself no favours with the disc’s tenuous concept and the embarrassing Dolce vita dress-up. Doing an imitation of Ekberg’s famous scene in the fountain is like standing over a subway air vent in Marilyn Monroe’s full-skirted white dress. It just looks silly. Decca and Raeburn tried to present Bartoli as a sexpot early in her career, and it didn’t work. Her appeal is more earthy and elegant than that. For years, her handlers respected that, but now they seem to have decided that a sexier look is needed.
And you know what? It still doesn’t work, except as a way of tarnishing the image of a great singer.