Renée & Cecilia

(Renée Fleming)

Fleming e Bartoli são duas das mais extraordinárias cantoras líricas da actualidade.

Salvo erro, actuaram juntas em As Bodas de Fígaro, no Met, em finais dos anos 1990. Terfel foi o Fígaro dessa produção. Segundo rezam as crónicas, o trio proporcionou um espectáculo mítico. Consta que o teatro ia indo a baixo, depois de Bartoli interpretar Deh vieni non tardar...

Fleming deve ser a melhor Condessa desde Te Kanawa e Terfel o Fígaro absoluto...

A notícia que abaixo cito destaca os últimos registos discográficos das duas divas.

«(...) Long evident in their discographies, these attributes shine again in their latest recordings, both for Decca. Ms. Fleming’s “Verismo” and Ms. Bartoli’s “Sacrificium” are like graduate seminars dressed up as recitals.

Ms. Fleming, 50, recalls the advice given her by Herbert Breslin, who masterminded Luciano Pavarotti’s career. “ ‘You won’t make it if you don’t sing bread-and-butter Italian opera,’ he told me,” Ms. Fleming said in a recent telephone interview. “I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that. I’m American. I’m eclectic. I’m going to follow my musical passions. And if people don’t like it, and it hurts my legacy, I’m not going to worry about that.”

The late 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th have proved particularly congenial to Ms. Fleming’s gifts. In 2006 she surveyed that period on “Homage: The Age of the Diva,” recorded in St. Petersburg, Russia, with Valery Gergiev leading the Orchestra of the Maryinsky Theater. Inspired by historic recordings of stars like Mary Garden, Maria Jeritza, Rosa Ponselle, Emmy Destinn and Lotte Lehmann, the program included a sprinkling of favorites among a spate of rediscoveries.

(...)

In “Verismo,” featuring the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi conducted by Marco Armiliato, she concentrates on the “young school” of Italians who followed in the wake of Verdi. Balancing 7 tracks by the grand master Puccini (including a few obvious choices) are 10 thoroughly unfamiliar selections from composers remembered as one-trick ponies. Pietro Mascagni is represented not by “Cavalleria Rusticana” but by “Iris” and “Lodeletta”; Alfredo Catalani, by an aria from “La Wally” but not the familiar one. A risqué showstopper from Riccardo Zandonai’s “Conchita” wins out over his swooning “Francesca da Rimini.” Ruggero Leoncavallo, of “Pagliacci” fame, is heard from in excerpts from his “La Bohème” and from “Zazà.”

(...)

Like much else in Ms. Fleming’s program, this is classic four-hankie material. Fallen women loom large in verismo, and in the minds of many opera fans their music cries out for sobbing, heart-on-sleeve emotionalism. Instead Ms. Fleming ennobles it with her cool classicism, following models both starry and unsung: among them, Gloria Davy, Claudia Muzio, Renata Scotto and Lynne Strow Piccolo.

(...)

Ms. Bartoli conducts her research with a little team of scholars. For “Sacrificium” libraries were combed from Naples to Stockholm, Oxford to Berlin.

“I made my name singing Rossini,” Ms. Bartoli, 43, said recently from Vienna, “and I still sing Rossini. He was a great composer, and his music is great for maintaining the flexibility of the voice. But Rossini came from somewhere. Going backward from Rossini I discovered Mozart and Haydn. From Mozart and Haydn, I came to Gluck and Vivaldi and Salieri. One thing leads to another.”

(...)

“When people think of the castrati, they think of incredible technique,” Ms. Bartoli said. “But Nicola Porpora, who taught many of the greatest of them, including Farinelli, and composed for them, always emphasized expression and emotion, the nuance in the words.”

In “Sacrificium” Ms. Bartoli runs the gamut from unbridled fireworks (in the forgotten Francesco Araia’s “Cadrò, ma qual si mira,” described in the notes as “probably the most difficult Baroque aria ever written”) to exquisite delicacy (Porpora’s “Usignolo sventurato,” which mimics the nightingale).

(...)

“If I sang nothing but Rossini all my life, I’d be in one space,” she said. “To make your own space, you have to do research. You have to go deep. My space keeps changing.”»