Cecilia Bartoli.(THE SALIERI ALBUM - Arias by Salieri)(Sound Recording Review)

[] "THE SALIERI ALBUM" Arias by Salieri. Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Fischer. Texts and translations. Decca B0001097-02

Cecilia Bartoli has been following a humanitarian version of "bait and switch" for some time now. With the fame thing accomplished, she could have spent the next twenty years making up new cadenzas for "Una vote poco Fa." Instead, she met a resourceful musicologist, Claudio Osele, and hit the library stacks. The resulting Vivaldi Album, a slew of fascinating arias by an ever-popular composer, won a Grammy award and took care of broadening her fan base while building its trust.

Clout and bankability in tow, Bartoli educated that same fan base by exposing it to worthwhile material it would not otherwise encounter, with Dreams and Fables, a CD that spotlighted Gluck (a bit of a stretch for the general public, but a favorite of cognoscenti), won another Grammy and paved the way for The Salieri Album, a collection of arias by the most famous composer whose music no one knows.

Name-recognition aside, this guy needs a publisher. Bartoli and Osele had to prepare their own performing editions from eighteenth-century manuscripts. But it was worth it: selections from nine of the composer's forty operas illustrate the breadth of his theatrical style (serious, comic and in-between) and the extent of his compositional genius and skill at orchestration. (There's an aria scored for nothing but clarinets, bassoons and bass-line, and another containing a written-out cadenza for the weird combination of voice, oboe, horns, trumpet and timpani.) And he must have been quite a teacher. (You've no doubt heard of his pupils Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt.)

Bartoli, ...