Cecilia Bartoli's new CD, Opera Proibita, is both a return and an exploration. It's a return to the mezzo soprano's native Rome, and an exploration of what she clearly sees as a kind of underground music written there in the first decade of the 18th century, when the theatres were closed and opera was effectively out of bounds. Composers responded by concentrating their operatic instincts on the oratorio, writes Michael Dervan
The idea for the CD came out of a situation of adversity. A planned Zurich production of Haydn's opera Armida was dropped when the conductor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, had to cancel. Haydn's operas are quite a specialised area of the repertoire (explored in Ireland only by the Wexford Festival and Opera Theatre Company), and finding an alternative for Armida also meant finding a work which doesn't demand the use of a chorus. In the event, the substitution that took place was not another opera, but Handel's early oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion), with Marc Minkowski replacing Harnoncourt.
The oratorio was staged - by no means a first for a Handel oratorio - and was, says Bartoli, the biggest success of that season in Zurich. It was the fact that the work dated from Handel's years in Rome which set her off on her musical exploration.
She positively glows with pride and pleasure when she talks about Rome, its history, its buildings, its music. And the music for the new CD, 15 wide-ranging arias, all from the first decade of the 18th century, concentrates on just three composers, Handel, naturally, Alessandro Scarlatti (father of Domenico, the composer of the famous keyboard sonatas), and Antonio Caldara, a composer whose fate for a long time was to be known mainly through a handful of those arie antiche singers like to use as warm-ups at the beginning of a recital.
The four Caldara arias, she says, are all world premiere recordings, and she feels in them a strong link to earlier polyphonic music - "he has it in his blood".
In Scarlatti, from the Neapolitan school, "you feel the Neapolitan folklore". She instances Hope's aria from Il Giardino di Rose, which "reminds me of popular melodies".
With Handel, "we are in another world. Listening to La Resurrezione, and the range of some of the arias, you think this is not possible to sing, it's absolutely instrumental. And you realise it was written for castrati. It's clear it was composed for singers with incredible possibilities, technically, and from the point of view of expression, too. You have this extraordinary element of astonishment in Lascia la spina, too (from Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno)." This is the one aria on the disc which will be readily recognised - Handel recycled it in his opera Rinaldo.
On the CD, she says "it's from the role of Il Piacere, when Pleasure tries to encourage Beauty to take pleasure in life, because a moment will come when time and disillusion will arrive and you will realise that you will lose your beauty."
The operatic possibilities of this particular Handel oratorio, and the later Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità (The Triumph of Time and Truth), were not lost on Gerald Barry, whose second opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, was inspired by them.
Bartoli has no hesitation in dwelling on the operatic nature of the early 18th-century oratorios.
"In the music you have very sensual moments, very heroic moments, incredible energy, incredible contrasts. The music was written in the lens of opera. But opera was forbidden, and the cardinals, like Cardinal Ottoboni, who loved opera, they found a way, with camouflage, writing libretti with sacred, allegorical or biblical subjects.
"Just think that in one oratorio of Caldara, Il trionfo dell'innocenza, the story is about a woman who has decided to leave town and go to a monastery. She's disguised as a priest, and for a while nobody knows her real identity. Another woman comes to the monastery, and she falls in love with her as Padre Eugenio. It's clear from the text you have Padre Eugenio saying, go, you have to make penance for this impossible love, you have to pray to God to help you refuse the love.
"But what the music suggests is a totally different thing. The temptation in the music is just amazing. She has to refuse, but what the music suggests is the contrary, actually. And on top of that ambiguity you have to remember that this was performed by men, because it was castrati who sang at that time. Of course, you have the sacred element in the text. But I'm just thinking about the audience. This was a private audience. The pieces were performed in private palaces, with the exception of Holy Week, when the audience was public. I'm just wondering, what was the reaction of the private audience to a situation like this?"
Performing music written for castratos is, she says, "particularly demanding for women. The castrato's capacity for oxygen was a man's capacity, so you already have to prove to yourself that you are able to breathe like a man, which is not so obvious for women. And there's this incredible range, from the very low register to the very high register - keeping the voice in one, keeping the long phrase until the end of the phrase, this is really demanding. And at the same time you have to express whatever you're saying." Singing music written for castrato voices, she says, is a great way for her to develop and improve her technique.
She has of course listened to the extraordinary recordings made in 1902 and 1904 by the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi. "Sometimes you realise that, really, the castrato voice was more similar to a female voice than to a male counter tenor voice. And in the 18th century when a castrato was sick he was replaced by a woman, not by a counter tenor. They used counter tenors only for religious music, in churches. In our time, we think the counter tenor sounds like the castrato of the 18th century. But, no. History is different. Of course, to listen to a counter tenor voice is very interesting, the way they can use the voice, make this beautiful messa di voce [a swelling of tone] - it's amazing.
"It's clear Moreschi was not the castrato of the ciècle, you know. But it's a wonderful document for us to understand more or less what the sound was like, whether it was more male or more female. And it was very powerful, because it was a man singing with a man's power in the body."
There was a time when Bartoli released albums that were more conventional in their selection of material than Opera Proibita. Her output in recent years has focused on concept albums, resurrecting neglected work by Vivaldi, Gluck and Salieri, and now bringing Handel, Scarlatti and Caldara together under a provocative banner. Is this because she feels that listeners need more focus and more stimulation now than they did in the past?
"I think if it's not the people, it's definitely that I need more. It's a personal desire, making albums focusing on a single composer or, in this case, a theme."
It's all a concentration on getting deeper into the music. "My wish, as with Salieri, for instance, is not only to perform music that's rarely been performed, but also to present a composer who everybody pretends to know and no one had really known at all."
Here she's effectively pointing to one of the paradoxes of modern musical life. There's a sense in which early music has become a kind of new music, a cutting-edge experience for those who have turned away from genuinely new compositions of our own time. The performing style is often innovative. Bartoli sings with period-instruments bands - Marc Minkowski's Les Musiciens du Louvre on the new disc - and she provides the frisson of venturing into areas unfamiliar and sometimes totally unknown. The Caldara of the new CD is, for instance, rarer than anything at this year's Wexford Festival.
"There are", she says, "alot of young people coming to baroque concerts, more than to the romantic music. I've wondered why, why it attracts this young audience, 25, 26 years old. In the baroque structure you have more variety, in a way. The rhythmic element is strong, there's high contrast, it's very dynamic music. At the same time you have the purity of simple melodies. And I think this rhythmic element makes young people more interested in the music."
Of course, in her own case, there's also that astonishing communicative freedom, with hallmark driving energy, intimate entreaty and coquettish seduction. They're all amply demonstrated on the new CD with that commitment to expressive daring which is all her own.
Cecilia Bartoli's Opera Proibita is out on the Decca label
