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Ruben sent this to me ,asking me,to post it . Here it is:http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/news/ny-ledesing4477755oct22,0,1474206.story
It's a crime to miss Bartoli
BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER
October 22, 2005
There are singers, there are stars and there's Cecilia Bartoli, the one worth mortgaging the family pet to hear in person.
Her recordings are excellent enough; her latest, "Opera proibita," proves that the church authorities who forced licentious opera underground in early 18th century Rome gave it a subversive urgency. But that packaged Bartoli is a pasteurized version of the recital she gave at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday. On a CD you can hear her sophistication. Live, you sense her sinew.
Bartoli, who has all the quiet dignity of a pro wrestler, treats the recital as a form of exuberant confinement. Wearing a broad grin and a hideous mouthwash-colored gown, she pumped her fists and shrugged her shoulders, barely restraining herself from grabbing a baton and conducting, or yanking a bow and fiddling, or lifting a battle-ax and galloping around the stage.
All that boiling carnal enthusiasm went into the music instead. Bartoli has pearly-voiced colleagues who can twirl a lovely lariat of notes. One or two can squeeze as much feeling out of a melancholy song. But nobody else sings Baroque music with her sheer physicality, and nobody else summons a da capo aria from so deep within her loins.
A popular misconception holds that instinct and technique conflict: that a visceral musician will be raw and a controlled one soulless. Bartoli makes hogwash of those distinctions. She sprays out quick melismas as if misting a room with diamonds. She utters a long "Ah" and threads it through a dozen shades and textures, from cottony to brassy and back. She twines her voice with an oboe and matches its mewling tone. Musical passions matter too much for her to blunt them with sloppiness.
Her program covered the early 1700s in her native Rome, a period when the church banned opera as too sinful for public exposure. The Roman rich responded to this prohibition by moving opera into private mansions and disguising it as religious music. The love stories were spiritual now, the heroes allegorical, the sentiments impeccably lofty. But, oh, that steamy music!
"Forbidden Opera" is only the latest in a string of resurrection projects that Bartoli has bestowed on a grateful Europe. Her base - and that of the terrific period orchestra that accompanied her, La Scintilla - is the Zurich Opera, where she has introduced rarities by Rossini, Haydn and Handel. Some critics have rapped her knuckles for skipping the repertoire's central roles and spending so much time on arcana. But once she has unearthed an aria, it doesn't stay obscure.
It's criminal that New York City has missed out on so much of her operatic career. She last sang at the Met in 1998 and has made vague allusions to coming back in 2008 - a decade lost to the company's timidity. That house may be too cavernous for her, but the Time Warner Center's Rose Hall would do quite well. If Rome could preserve opera during its outlaw days, and Bartoli could exhume it, then surely New York impresarios can find a way to lure one of our era's most important artists back to the lyric stage.
CECILIA BARTOLI. The mezzo-soprano, with the Orchestra La Scintilla. Music of Scarlatti, Handel and Caldara. Attended Wednesday at Carnegie Hall.
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New York review 
