Suffering for art’s sake

Cecilia Bartoli
Barbican

Messiah
Coliseum

After a brief but inspissatedly tedious overture by Porpora, played by Il Giardino Armonico, the curtains at the Barbican were pulled aside and Cecilia Bartoli, dressed like a highwayperson from a 1940s escapist movie, sprang on to the stage, flung off her feathered hat, rocked with superabundant energy as the orchestra played the introduction to her first aria, from another opera of Porpora’s, and launched into the first of many elaborate analogies between love and other conditions which might give an excuse for lots of drooping and even more giddy coloratura. She was on amazing form, and was greeted and received with almost hysterical rapture.

Last year I was not the only reviewer to feel that her concert was reminiscent of late Schwarzkopf, but that couldn’t have occurred to anyone this year. She is promoting her latest album, Sacrificium, a tribute to the many thousands of boys who were castrated in the hope of pleasing the Church vocally and in other ways. The notes make gruelling reading, but Bartoli, while writing touchingly about the sacrifice, is determined to make the best of what came out of it, which seems, on the evidence of the concert and CD, to be an unending series of operas by mediocrities who were fully versed in producing arias that demonstrate what the castrati could do by way of breath control, immense vocal range, and generalised expressiveness.

There was Handel too, of course, but we all know him, and he had to wait until the encores. Up to then, concentration was exclusively on the performer, and any expectations anyone had were more than fulfilled — unless they expected a voice of some volume. For what immediately registered, from the human volcano onstage, was how small the voice now is, never having been large.