To misquote Shakespeare’s Enobarbus, in Antony and Cleopatra: “Other sopranos cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.” Cecilia Bartoli has just been singing the fabled Egyptian queen in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt) as the centrepiece of her first year as artistic director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. This is a new role for the singer, who still calls herself a mezzo-soprano, even though most of the operatic roles she sings today are more usually sung by true sopranos. No matter. At the time when her parts were written, composers conceived them with specific singers in mind, and often adapted them for others of different vocal range.
Cleopatra is a canny choice of repertoire. Bartoli first played Handel’s “immortal sex kitten” in 2005 at the Zurich Opera House, essentially her home base until the present season. Zurich’s outgoing intendant, Alexander Pereira, now has overall artistic and administrative responsibility for the Salzburg festivals, and appointing Bartoli for the brief Whitsun bash effectively ties her to the summer’s main event. Pereira’s Salzburg will see the return to Mozart’s birthplace of the biggest opera stars: Jonas Kaufmann in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Carmen; Anna Netrebko and Piotr Beczala in La Bohème; and Bartoli, of course, reprising her Cleopatra alongside Andreas Scholl (Cesare), Anne Sofie von Otter (Cornelia) and the cult French “sopranista” Philippe Jaroussky (Sesto).
The Whitsun festival, however, gives Bartoli the chance to explore her theme — Cleopatra torn between power and love — in unexpected ways. To supplement two performances of Julius Caesar (five more in the summer) at the medium-sized House for Mozart, the French singers Sophie Koch and Ludovic Tézier starred as the Egyptian queen and Mark Antony in a rare concert performance of Massenet’s last opera, Cléopâtre, completed just before his death 100 years ago. The Bulgarian diva Vesselina Kasarova sang Berlioz’s cantata La Mort de Cléopâtre in a concert by John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and Bartoli commissioned a new work from the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin to showcase a contemporary Cleopatra, in the lustrous form of Netrebko — unfortunately, she pulled out, to be replaced by the rising German starlet, Mojca Erdmann. In order not to disappoint the star-gazing members of the audience, Bartoli chose to add some Mozart arias to Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky Orchestra programme, and sang them herself.
I missed the Gardiner and Gergiev concerts, but caught Massenet’s Cléopâtre, the Julius Caesar staging and an astonishing concert, Cleopatra virtuosa, in which Bartoli sang no fewer than 17 numbers, including three encores, with one of her favourite period-instrument ensembles, Giovanni Antonini’s Il Giardino armonico, which also served as pit band for the staged opera.
Age may not have withered her voice, but it is a very different one from the rich, agile mezzo that exploded like a Roman candle before the public in the late 1980s on her bestselling Rossini and Mozart discs. It has lost some of its beauty — especially under pressure — and her coloratura technique now occasionally seems effortful and contrived, rather than effortless and pearly, but the artistry has deepened and she doesn’t stint herself. She delivered everything she sang with conviction and spellbinding musical nuance. Unlike so many singers as they advance into middle age, Bartoli (46 tomorrow) doesn’t go for easier options. The bravura arias from Cleopatra operas by Handel’s young German contemporaries Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783) and Carl Heinrich Graun (c1704-59) require even greater virtuosity than Handel’s own, but Bartoli rattles off the runs, leaps, trills and flourishes with exhilarating dash, all the while looking as if she is having a ball.
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Her concert frock — a black, diaphanous, pleated “Egyptian” skirt over trousers, and a provocative golden bodice with a peek-a-boo slit to reveal luscious cleavage, her right arm adorned with a golden snakey armband — was far more flattering than anything she was given to wear by the costume designer for Julius Caesar, Agostino Cavalca. But it was the infinite variety of colours she brought to her soft singing of slow arias — Handel’s F sharp minor Se pieta, her final aria, Lascia la spina (forerunner of the more famous Lascia ch’io pianga, from Rinaldo) — that made the evening especially memorable. She stretches out tempos to extremes, but her breath control and palette of timbres remain miraculous; and, as ever, her savour of her native language is impeccable.
In the latter respect, she stood out from her co-stars in Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s messy, muddled, more or less contemporary staging of Julius Caesar. The French-Israeli team began — and finished — as if they were taking Handel’s anti-heroic love story very seriously indeed as a contemporary commentary on the Arab spring or the Syrian debacle. Alas, it soon degenerated into a parade of (sadly not very funny) Pythonesque “humour”, intermingled with episodes of sex’n’violence. Bartoli’s arias were the highlights, matched by Scholl’s soft-grained, unheroic Caesar, more Clark Kent than Superman. The directors’ inability to decide whether the opera is tragic comedy or comic tragedy was exemplified when the entire cast — including two ostensibly dead characters — came on for the final scene wearing ancient Egyptian fancy dress and quaffing champagne, as if the show had been a joke, and the stage gates of the theatre were opened to reveal the Toscanini-Hof outside, with an advancing German tank and machinegun-wielding soldiers. This didn’t go down well with an Austrian audience, who booed their heads off at Caurier, Leiser and co at the end.