Word: bartoli
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Young Cecilia Bartoli has verve and a splendiferous voice...
...opened the way for Bartoli, her reputation has grown worldwide because of her five solo CDs -- mostly of Rossini and Mozart but also including Vivaldi and Scarlatti. Her just-released CD, If You Love Me, a group of giddy 18th century Italian songs, now tops the classical charts. Not until 1994 and after will her opera career come to full fruition, given the enormous lead time that productions now require...
...albums capture the qualities that make her recitals sellout events. Bartoli grabs the audience. She sings with her eyes too. In Rossini, who has lavish comic zest, she courts the phrases and the audience as well. She displays, as Levine says, "an exceptional instrument, personality, grasp of the music and the text and, most of all, the ability to communicate all this...
What comes next for this young virtuoso? The opera schedule is daunting: The Barber in Houston next spring, her American debut; Don Giovanni in a heavyweight Salzburg production conducted by Barenboim in 1994; the Met's Cosi fan tutte the following season. Bartoli is happily caught up in her repertory, but her fans, as well as many opera managers, already ache to see her expand it. Why not the big-money operas -- Verdi and, above all, Carmen...
...Verdi, Bartoli says, "Never!" Carmen has been offered by several houses and turned down -- at least until she is in her 30s. The wise men who hover over her career, like Barenboim and Levine, hope she sticks to her resolve. The fact is that, lovely as her voice is, it is not large. But 26 is very young. It is nearly impossible to predict how a voice will develop; the supreme Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad sang operetta in her 20s. "You must never force," Bartoli insists. "The test is after the concert: Is the voice still fresh so that you could...