Cecilia Bartoli: A voice that defies time | BBC Global

What is a musician? It's a painter. You have to paint with your voice, with your piano, with your violin, but you have to paint. Play with the shadow, play with the colours. Play with reflection. This is, for me, is a musician. Cecilia, what she is, is charisma. Cecilia sees herself as a catalyst between the music and the audience. That is why you are struck by the joy that she seems to take in performance. It's not only about presence, it's what she gives you. Each person in the audience feels like she sings for them. She fills the room with power and energy. She does everything with a real plan and strategy. It's rediscovering music which was completely forgotten. It's like the world stops and everybody is feeling the same thing at the same time. Rimini is an important city for me. My father was from Rimini. And I grew up a little bit here. My first impression was freedom. Because being in a place which is in a small city like this one, when the people, they know each other. And then, as a child, I was free to go to the street, to play. My father was a singer, my mother was a singer. The friends of my parents were singers, so it was like every people in the world sings. I felt at the beginning of my life. We had no babysitter, so I grew up in an opera house. So for me it was like, ok, let me try. And then I realized, wow, I can do that myself. And I'm singing almost 40 years, can you imagine that? The good things about my parents, they never pushed me to become an opera singer. They said, if you want to do it, let's try, let's see, let's have fun. And I think this was the success. I performed Rosina when I was 20 years old. I remember this moment like, mamma mia. I was so afraid, my goodness. This really was a big step for me. You never know, I mean, when you perform in front of a TV, you never know how many people will watch you. But it was a successful, yes, moment, yeah. Her rise was very quick. It didn't take long before she was singing star roles and getting rave reviews for her personality as much as her singing. The most incredible library in Italy. This was one of the first libraries that was open to the public. It's shocking to realize that composers, they all had this in their mind. And just, you know, so the picture in their brain was so clear that they just put it on the paper. For me, it's always like, wow, how is it possible to have this so clear? I start to be interested in Baroque music and 18th century music when I was really quite young. So when I went to the Conservatory of Music in Rome, Santa Cecilia, and I thought, yeah, I will learn this music because this music will make me, I will be able to understand better romantic music if you go back to the source, you know, and see the development of music. I was always attracted by Vivaldi. And I had the idea to make a recording of arias from operas of Vivaldi, which was really a premiere in the music world. After the release of the recording, I mean, there was a kind of renaissance of Vivaldi music. I found Rossini really a fascinating composer. And in this letter, he's mentioning For him, this was singing, then you feel it in your soul. You needed a very agile voice, really like a bird. And for me, it was fascinating to jump, you know, very high, very low with a lot of passages and fly. I'm a kind of ambassador, I think. I feel at least this responsibility here in my country, or outside my country. We have a responsibility to support our heritage. Do you understand? It's more expensive than the auto, yes, than the car. This is Italy. It's the best place in the world. I matched with Cecilia artistically because of this common perfectionism. We found immediately some special connection between us. In all my life, I've waited for this moment. Besides the technical aspect, which is clearly amazing, there is something which struck me deeply from the beginning, which is the way she can relate to the text. The way she can use colours in her voice. I call it a rhetorical way of singing, which is a very old tradition in Italian singing. I define it sometimes as an open laboratory, what we are doing. We have the possibility really to experiment with something new, because she can decide all the aspects of the production. Rehearsal for me is extremely interesting, because in the rehearsal times give you the hope that you can always improve what you are doing. She is demanding, you have to be very prepared with her, and also you have to know everything, you have to know your role and you have to be ready, but it's always fun. Everybody is very, very free on stage and we enjoy ourselves really, really a lot. She is simply extraordinary to us colleagues, and everything she does with us outside the stage is transmitted to all of us also on stage. Cecilia really has this generosity, she trusts her musicians, she wants to create a family on stage. But in this case, the rehearsals are already a show in the show. It is very easy to work with her, because everything becomes natural. From the moment she enters the scene, she is already living in the skin of Rosina, or Cenerentola, or the character she is playing. It is very easy, because the atmosphere is created and everything flows. You don't have to think much, just be and nothing else. Yes. Our orchestra, Le Musicien du Prince, we are all so dedicated to Cecilia and to Gianluca and all this amazing project. She surrounds herself with other great artists. I have to prepare the tour now with Lang Lang, one of the greatest pianists of his generation. With Lang Lang and Cecilia, you've got two superstars coming together on the same platform, but not necessarily a platform you'd expect them to share. My first time working with her, I was like, how can she make such a sound? This is just really hard to use in words, to express. It's really directly from heaven, you know, this kind of sound. Every time she's calling me for a project, I'm just so excited. To share her love to you and to the audience, you know, the most beautiful emotions. It's so important to listen to each other, I think. It's a conversation, it's a meditation. He's giving me, asking me something, and then I take this and back to him. Uh-huh. Actually, not only I get inspired with her, but I learn a lot of things, you know, which I never felt to play in that shape or in that direction or in that kind of meaning to synergize with the lyrics. Yes, this is the secret. Respirare insieme. Even though she does a lot of Baroque music, it's completely different interpretations. And the way that everything she brings each year is like a music journey, and she's trying to break through some new ideas and to give us completely different sound experience. She's committed in what she's doing and she's very curious about discovering, we can say new things, but actually old things. The project Sacrificio, we decided to look for arias of the greatest composers of the 18th century like Porpora or Handel. So the one who really composed music for the divas of the 18th century, which were the castrato. You have this incredible music because they really had no limits in the voice and in the range. You have this from one side and you have the horrible things about castration, which was a kind of fashion in the 18th century. For me it was a challenge and a difficult one. You cannot do this only because you want to be controversial. You really have to study hard in order to train your body also, not just your vocal cord. It was demanding but interesting also to discover this and to be somehow able, at the limit, but able to do that. She makes people talk about this music. You have her recording of Farinelli for which all the artwork in that is her wearing a beard. It makes you ask questions in what she's presenting and in the way she's doing it. Cecilia has a standing in the opera world that's very unusual in its dual nature. She's very well respected as a singer and yet she's also been running the Salzburg Witson Festival. She's set up her own orchestra, Musicien du Prince. This puts her in an unusual position of being able to set the agenda in classical music. It would be great to create an orchestra in Europe who plays until the instrument part of the chord. We founded the orchestra 10 years ago. I tell always the orchestra, don't forget Cecilia is our creator. She's also our artistic director. So she can always express what she thinks. She has a very kind way to do it. What she does is always very intense, very thoughtful. She worked a lot about how to perform the music of the past. And that's the magic that bound me, her and Musicien du Prince. It's really a laboratory where we can investigate the way they performed. The idea was to perform this music on period instruments. The instruments are from that period. Some are copies of course. The way they use the bow is much quicker and it's become more light, more sparkling, which is something, somehow is new. We're more used to listen to Baroque music performed with period instruments, not really the bel canto, you know, Rossini and Bellini. This sonority of the orchestra brings such a new dimension to the music of Rossini. It's totally a different, new sound. For Rossini, you really need champagne in the music. His music is full of energy, of passion. He can be very funny, he can be very dramatic. He can be very profound and very hilarious, you know. Yes, another word that can define the way we do music together is perfectionism. She's a perfectionist, this is clear. And each new performance is always a possibility to do better. The nerves mean adrenaline. Adrenaline means being on stage and having fun, you know. So for Correa, I mean, there are not so many singers that can sing the same role 40 years ago up to today. Yeah, secret is passion.