Crowd pleaser

Cecilia Bartoli
Barbican

Turandot
Royal Opera House

For this year’s appearance at the Barbican, Cecilia Bartoli, ever exploratory in her repertoire, chose an evening of canzone, songs by composers and a few by singers of the bel canto repertoire. She was accompanied by the hyper-reticent Sergio Ciomei at the piano. Admittedly, the accompaniments to these pieces are not in the least interesting, but they do need to be heard. A recital by Bartoli is in all senses an occasion. It is very much a matter of seeing what this performer is like now, just as it was with Schwarzkopf. And, as with Schwarzkopf in her later recitals, one is impressed by the sheer calculation of it all, from the moment she appears, marches on to the stage, distributes smiles to her admirers like blessings, and adjusts her expression for the first number.

She began with the relatively well-known three songs in Venetian dialect by Rossini, which she characterised brilliantly. It was evident that, quite differently from her recent albums of disinterred operatic composers, she was concerned to allure us with her personality, injecting feeling and sometimes vigour into fragile vehicles. Bellini fared even better than Rossini, with tender, anxious songs of forlornly hoped-for or lost love voiced in his characteristic sinuous, poignant melodies. Bartoli did nothing to exaggerate the pathos, as she does to grotesque effect in her new recording of La Sonnambula. The only trouble was that, with a generously proportioned programme, about two hours of music, the effect became a little wearisome. What the fans had come for — and the Barbican was seething with them — tended to come towards the end, when the diva launched into rataplans and other dread weapons of artistic destruction, and delivered the machine-gun coloratura which is found so exciting by those who can bear it at all.