Isabel Bayrakdarian.(Isabel Bayrakdarian's beautifully modulated soprano voice in Cleopatra)(Opera Review)

Isabel Bayrakdarian

* "CLEOPATRA" Arias by Graun, Hasse, Handel, Mattheson. Tafdrnusik Baroque Orchestra, Larnon. Texts and translations. CBC Records SMCD 5233

Isabel Bayrakdarian's beautifully modulated soprano voice is brilliant on top, rich in the middle and still full at the bottom. She balances dark with light seemingly according to whim, and she has excellent rhythm. The eighteenth-century repertoire chosen for this intriguing portrait of Cleopatra is not for the faint of heart: only two top largo tunes from Handel's Giulio Cesare will be easy-listening to auditors, while the Graun and Hasse selections require Olympian flights of coloratura, and the final, most fascinating scenes from an opera by Handel biographer Johannes Mattheson are Duse-on-demand.

In the battle of the Cleopatras that this recording presents, who would have expected Mattheson to triumph over Handel himself?. Yet this is exactly what happens in a splendidly vivid "Death of Cleopatra"--here given what is billed as its "world premiere recording"--that rivals Berlioz's scena for weight and trumps it for musical drama. Accompanied by sharp, stinging figures in the strings, Cleopatra demands in E minor "to be consumed by snakes, worms and newts," for she has consorted with the enemy and deserted her Marc Antony (who has already committed suicide himself); after this, a G-major world of tremolo strings accompanies Cleopatra in a final recitative, as the poison courses through her veins. It is fantastic music, more direct in its musical characterization than the later repertoire that fills the rest of the recital. ...