Dinner -- Italian Style.(opera singer Cecilia Bartoli)(Interview)

Cecilia Bartoli is one of the few great singers in our parched period. And, as is not always the case, her artistry is matched by her popularity. Her concerts, recitals and operas are mostly sellouts. Her two appearances at Carnegie Hall in March (with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony, singing Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete, plus a solo recital accompanied by Barenboim) are among the most eagerly anticipated events of New York's winter season. She's also one of the few bankable artists in today's declining classical-recording industry, having turned The Vivaldi Album, a disc of obscure arias, into one of Decca's biggest sellers last year.

It would seem that Bartoli could write her own ticket, anytime, anywhere. But a closer look at her career to date proves that isn't quite the case. Bartoli's appearances at the Met, for example, have not been nearly so frequent as her admirers had hoped, and her history with the company has been clouded by cancellations and what seems to be an inability to agree on repertory. It's not always so easy for Bartoli to get her way on recording projects, either. One might think that those in charge of these decisions would do anything within their means to please an artist of Bartoli's stature, yet too many of them seem almost afraid of her individuality, her ability to generate sparks no matter what she's singing. Last year, I was asked to appear on a radio program that was to focus on identifying the great singers of our time and tomorrow. I wanted to talk about Bartoli. Yet despite the mezzo's litany of virtues, the producer was unconvinced, coolly suggesting that she had been singing too long to be "of the future." (She was thirty-two at the time.)

No other singer today has Bartoli's range of color, her profoundly projected words or her miraculous, hair-trigger rhythm. Over the years, I have gathered a few samples of Bartoli's art live that most people have never heard. I have her "debut" in Tosca -- as the Shepherd Boy -- at Rome Opera. She was ten, and her chest tone was massive. I have her incredible account of Haydn's "Scena di Berenice." She sang it in London's cavernous Albert Hall in 1999, with Simon Rattle conducting. Then there is "Polo" from Falla's Seven Popular Spanish Songs, also from `99, live. She and piano virtuoso Jean-Yves Thibaudet take it daringly slow, and Bartoli slams into the final lines -- "Malhaya el amor, malhaya! Ay! Y quien me lo dio a entender! Ay!" (Cursed be love, and the one who taught it me!) -- with a chest voice that is bloodcurdling.

Throughout her career, Bartoli has resurrected the rare and even extinct. The Vivaldi Album is full of music found by the mezzo and her companion, Claudio Osole. Some of the "quality time" in their romance is spent in the library, looking at microfilm. Her next CD will be based on a musicological dig that she and Osole conducted, a collection of never-before-recorded Gluck arias from his "pre-revolutionary" period, based on Metastasio texts.

I spent time with Bartoli in Zurich last March. She was doing her first Fiordiligi in Cosi Fan Tutte. She may well be the first singer in history to perform all of the opera's female roles, two of them, Fiordiligi and Despina, unforgettably. (Her Dorabella ain't chopped liver, either.) Zurich, with its blessedly human scale, is a perfect house for Bartoli. The emotion, the soul of the character she is playing, shines in her eyes and in her body, and she can sing with endless variety of color (which usually reduces a voice's volume) without worrying about being heard.

Cosi is one of my favorite operas. Its story purports to be about odd coupling, but in its music I hear a painful longing, a bitter fear and an adumbration of death that are profoundly moving. Before Bartoli, the most astounding of some thirty Fiordiligis I had seen was Renee Fleming, operating on a huge scale at the Met. Bartoli was entirely, shockingly different. Each had an extraordinary mastery of the impossible writing, and each understood the role fully. But Bartoli, born to the language, physically yielding, suddenly able to express pain and heartbreak with a Latin hardness and fatality, was perfectly in touch with the cold wings of death that fan the chilly flames in the score.

Bartoli loved doing Fiordiligi. "You know," she says, "[Adriana Ferrarese] del Bene was the singer for whom Mozart wrote those alternate arias in Figaro, and she inspired Fiordiligi, which she sang one and a half years later. I did Susanna with the alternate arias at the Met [something that led to a much-publicized showdown with Jonathan Miller, the opera's director], and now a year and a half later I am doing Fiordiligi." She seemed so right as Fiordiligi that I tell her that was enough for me to describe her as "great."