You're In Gluck

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 3, 2001

Roger Covell

CECILIA BARTOLI

Dreams and Fables

(Composed by Gluck)

(Decca)

Pared back dramatics meet varied vocals.

Gluck's name is almost always accompanied by a reference to his interest in reforming opera in the interests of dramatic truth, lessening the tyranny of singers and eliminating meaningless vocal ornament.

The effect of this reputation is taken sometimes to imply that the main virtue of his music is its reformed bareness or that Gluck had the luck or financial resources to be above the hurly-burly of making a living in the 18th-century opera industry. For much of his creative life, however, this composer from Bohemia earned his keep as an itinerant composer of Italian opera.

Cecilia Bartoli, never a singer to shirk the challenges of virtuosity, has chosen eight arias and solo scenes - two of them longer than 10 minutes in performing time - from Gluck's many Italian operas. Typically, as a singer of bold, systematic and inquiring mind, she has also made sure all of these pieces are from operas with words by Pietro Metastasio, the dominant librettist of the 18th century.

Listeners who assume Gluck's vocal lines will be as simple and unadorned as Orpheus's lament for his lost bride in his most famous opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, will be surprised at how enthusiastically Gluck conforms to his singer's liking for florid decoration. There is also no doubt that he goes out of his way to provide opportunities for the surpassing skill of a particular singer: the mechanically fierce oscillations of pitch in Tremo fra' dubbi miei (I tremble in my uncertainty), for instance.

Unkind commentators have suggested that Gluck's restraint in the operas of his reform years owed something to the fact that his musical technique was smaller, more cramped, less fluent than that of some of his contemporaries. This disc, on which six of the eight items have not been previously recorded, confirms the sturdy, sometimes rather dogged energy of his rhythms in quicker tempos but also shows how his gift for dramatic truth and directness can work hand in hand with an elaborately varied vocal line.

Bartoli displays her usual death-defying nervelessness in the twists and turns of fast passages of fioritura, a superlative mastery of phrasing and an ability to extend her mezzo-soprano range into the soprano. This collaboration with Bernhard Forck's Berlin Academy for Early Music is lean and vital and the presentation of the disc within a bound booklet unusually handsome.