Cecilia Bartoli
There’s an element of truth in some of these points: artificially darkening the voice–placing it too far back in the throat to create a richer sound–is often a temptation, and a few who call themselves mezzos undoubtedly are sopranos. Which only makes life still more difficult for lyric mezzos, who, as the lighter-voiced members of the breed, are the ones most frequently accused of attempting to hide from the truth, particularly if they happen to possess good high notes. Frederica von Stade and Susanne Mentzer, two outstanding lyric mezzos who’ve both heard “Are you sure you’re not really a soprano?” a few times too often in their careers, once did the theoretically in their ranges but very soprano letter duet from The Marriage of Figaro at an AIDS benefit in San Francisco after announcing, “Now we’re going to prove to you once and for all that we really aren’t sopranos!”
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Vocal color is an important aspect of determining a singer’s category; another is where the strength and beauty of the voice lie. Does a woman sound better in her high range? her middle range? her low range? Her best range is connected to tessitura, or where a given piece of music lies on the staff. Any good mezzo should have a reliable A above the staff and good, ringing Es and Fs–but it’s a place she visits, not where she lives. (Even most true sopranos have trouble with a tessitura that goes above the staff and stays there, a fact lost on contemporary composers who don’t bother to learn anything about the voice and then work their sopranos to death with stratospheric tessituras.) Singing very high takes a lot of effort for most people, and singing in a comfortable place is important to vocal health.
Ever since her first appearance, Bartoli too has been a target of the “Is she a soprano?” routine. Some of this is her own fault, for recording overtly soprano repertoire (like Fiordiligi) she would never perform live. Some of it’s due to her enormous range: “That woman has great high notes–she’s a soprano whether she admits it or not!” And some of it is due to the impression that she might be artificially darkening her voice.
She was accompanied by the excellent Gyorgy Fischer on keyboards and by the merely acceptable string quartet I Delfici in the Vivaldi numbers. I Delfici’s violist is her brother Gabriele Bartoli; his presence may go a long way in explaining theirs.
