Cecilia Bartoli ~ Opera Proibita (Handel · Scarlatti · Caldara) / Les Musiciens du Louvre · Minkowski

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Cecilia Bartoli's new CD features a collection of music that could not be heard in her native Rome at the start of the 18th century due to Papal censorship. Theaters, the Church felt, were places of evil and corruption and operas led people to immorality. But some music-loving senior members of the priesthood asked composers to write oratorios and cantatas--indeed, operas without staging, essentially--for their own private entertainment. Call it what you will, the music is sensational--by turns virtuosic, gentle, and playful--and always expressive: just right, it seems, for Cecilia Bartoli's temperament. The opening aria on the CD, a call for peace in the name of Jesus, is, in fact, a dazzling martial air with trumpets blaring and the voice going through an amazing array of coloratura fireworks. It shows Bartoli at her most aggressive. The listener is practically hurled back from the speakers when she begins, with rapid-fire runs and trills and cascades of notes, all perfectly in place. Showy arias are offset by several tender ones ("Lascia la spina" from Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno returns in the composer's Rinaldo, four years later, as the now-famous "Lascia ch'io pianga"), and Bartoli exhibits again, her many, many levels of pianissimo and sensitive phrasing. Marc Minkowski and his Musiciens are just right for this repertoire and back Bartoli up superbly. This is a fascinating project, rivetingly performed and presented. --Robert Levine

Tracks:

All'arme si accesi guerrieri (Aria dell Pace)
Mentre io godo (Aria della Speranza)
Un pensiero nemico di pace
Vanne pentita a piangere
Sparga il senso lascivo veleno
Caldo Sangue
Come nembo che fugge col vento
Ecco negl'orti tuoi...Che dolce simpatica
Qui resta...L'alta Roma
Lascia la spina cogli la rosa
Ahi qual cordoglio...Doppio affetto
Si piangete pupille dolente
Ahi quanto cieca...Come foco allo splendore
Disserratevi oh porte d'Averno
Notte funesta...Ferma l'ali

Amazon.com

Cecilia Bartoli's new CD features a collection of music that could not be heard in her native Rome at the start of the 18th century due to Papal censorship. Theaters, the Church felt, were places of evil and corruption and operas led people to immorality. But some music-loving senior members of the priesthood asked composers to write oratorios and cantatas--indeed, operas without staging, essentially--for their own private entertainment. Call it what you will, the music is sensational--by turns virtuosic, gentle, and playful--and always expressive: just right, it seems, for Cecilia Bartoli's temperament. The opening aria on the CD, a call for peace in the name of Jesus, is, in fact, a dazzling martial air with trumpets blaring and the voice going through an amazing array of coloratura fireworks. It shows Bartoli at her most aggressive. The listener is practically hurled back from the speakers when she begins, with rapid-fire runs and trills and cascades of notes, all perfectly in place. Showy arias are offset by several tender ones ("Lascia la spina" from Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno returns in the composer's Rinaldo, four years later, as the now-famous "Lascia ch'io pianga"), and Bartoli exhibits again, her many, many levels of pianissimo and sensitive phrasing. Marc Minkowski and his Musiciens are just right for this repertoire and back Bartoli up superbly. This is a fascinating project, rivetingly performed and presented. --Robert Levine

Album Description

Limited Australian pressing. An extraordinary album of dramatic arias written in Rome at a time when opera performance was forbidden by the Church, and female singers were forbidden from singing in public. Decca. 2005.

Customer Reviews:

Only one diva, only Bartoli........2007-06-19

Just like Farinelli was the opera phenomenon of his time, fast-forward to the 21st century, Bartoli gives once again this music of the Italian settecento a breath of new life in all its splendor and glory.

In Opera Proibita, Bartoli's repertoire not only reflects on her as a consummate vocal artist but also as the ultimate scholar. Rarely an opera singer would dig this dip and go that far to unearth great scores from total obscurity. Even more uncommonly a singer would take the challenge of singing these arias without the risk of ridiculing herself, but to the contrary establishing a new record and precedent.

Her execution of the Handel arias is truly astonishing in coloratura and melismas probably not heard for three hundred years when only the best castrati commanded the virtuosity to tackle these arias. Also surprising and refreshing was to hear works by Handel that show his wild side.

Bartoli brings this album to a high climax with the arias from Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. This is really her realm and true medium. Her vocal runs in "Un pensiero nemico di face" sound like a first violin, and as if this was not difficult enough she ornaments the da capo melismas in tempo from allegro to presto molto vivace, and transitions into a note crescendo with great ease and certainty. Wonderful!

Amazing disc.......2007-03-03

This disc has all the elements needed for an amazing disc. The conductor, orchestra, and music are all top notch. Bartoli's singing is amazing. I find this album energizing and a testament to how exciting baroque music can be. However, if you don't like Bartoli's voice in previous recordings, you probably won't change your opinion because of this disc.

Beautiful Music, but vocally unmusical........2007-02-09

I owned over a dozen of Bartoli solo albums, plus other operatic albums of hers. From the early days of 'Arias Antique' I got impressed by her beautiful singing and her outstanding technique.
Alas, starting from her Vivaldi Album, I do not find her singing that beautiful any more. True, the songs picked there are technically very challenging, used to be sung by male castrato singers. The songs picked here are even more difficult.
BUT - is singing just about technique?
There are some songs in the Vivaldi Album that have the vocal musical lines broken in places. Here in Opera Proibita, almost every song has this problem, even the slow ones of Caldara. Compare her singing in the earlier part of her career, her early Mozart operas, I could not help but wonder if Ms. Bartoli has taken the correct turn in her career: her forced high notes, though squarely hit, do not sound at all pleasing; her runs and trills, though taken accurately at great tempi, is no longer truly musical. Compare her singing with the other two great baroque mezzo-sopranos Bernarda Fink and the tragically short-lived late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, you would understand what I mean.

With the latest turn in Ms. Bartoli's singing, I am being forced to admit that this is a singer of great technical brilliance and enormous fame, but not at all pleasing to the ear.

Not to my taste.......2006-11-05

Cecilia Bartoli has her fans, no doubt, as the other reviews on this site demonstrate, people who love her warmth of tone and her impassioned interpretations. These vocal qualities may suit the performance conventions of the nineteenth-century repertoire; however in this anthology of eighteenth century sacred arias the result is an unhappy imbalance. The problem is, in my opinion, one of clashing calls for attention, whose affect is to distract the listener from attention to the music itself. True, the god of the counter-reformation was to be worshipped ecstatically. And true, also, that I am an anti-romantic listener, who grew up with those early music performances which valued detached purity of tone. This was vaunted as the ideal means of interpretation of the rediscovered seventeenth and eighteenth-century repertoire (it protested too much its rightness, and alienated people- but I like it). However to return to the subject at hand- I find Bartoli's readings of these crypto-erotic arias overblown and self-indulgent. I guess that this sort of coloratura always offered a chance for a bit of ego to be let loose, even in church- however when the performance goes so far as to insist on attention to itself rather than deflecting attention to the music, I stop enjoying the music. This recording does not find the balance between the big romantic personality and eighteenth-century performance conventions, which, after 30 or 40 years of self-critique, have some authority. I disliked it very much. I am a great admirer of Mark Minkowski's opera interpretations, which I think find a perfect balance between these opposing impulses of warm and cool- a binary we can trace throughout aesthetics and through the ages. Here there's an overbalance in favour of warm (hot, in fact), which the performers might argue is just the sort of vivification that Baroque performance needs. Not for me. I gave it to a friend (she's still a friend).

Exciting, moving, beautiful, energetic, heart-felt, fantastic..........2006-09-02

What more can I add?

Cecilia Bartoli just "does it" for me almost every time. She is just fantastic in my books. I love her dearly. She can give one an adrenalin rush with her bravura singing and then break one's heart with her pathos.

This is a superb collection of Baroque arias from "almost" operas! ;-))
I also liked the cheeky and none-too-subtle references to La Dolce Vita on
cover and the images inside the disc. Nice to see an opera singer with a playful sense of humour!

I am listening to this disc as I write this review and all I can say is that I love this disc and it is clearly one of the best Signorina Bartoli has released, although I like all of her recordings. Listen to track 12 and you will buy this disc.

More, please!

PS: How about DECCA getting Cecilia Bartoli and Andreas Scholl together for a musical project? I'd love to see two of my favourite singers together on the one disc.
PSPS: If you like Opera Proibita, buy Andreas Scholl's Arcadia and Arias for Senesino, too!