Cecilia Bartoli is a wonderful opera singer from Italy. Her voice type is coloratura mezzo-soprano. Bartoli's vocal abilities allow her to tackle the most difficult works. She has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal. Albums with recordings of Bartoli have sold a total circulation of more than ten million copies.
Early years and early achievements
Cecilia Bartoli was born on June 4, 1966 in Rome, the capital of Italy. Her parents were professional singers and worked at the Rome Opera House. The name of Cecilia's mother is Sylvanas, and it was she who became her daughter's first vocal teacher.
For the first time, the future celebrity appeared in front of the public at the age of nine. Then she played the role of a shepherdess in one of the crowd scenes in Puccini's opera Tosca.
When Cecilia was seventeen, she entered the conservatory - trombone class. And a few years later, in 1986, she announced herself as a promising opera singer, taking part in the TV show "Fantastico". As part of this program, she, in tandem with the baritone Leo Nucci, performed an excerpt from The Barber of Seville, an opera by Gioacchino Rossini.
Cecilia did not manage to become the winner of "Fantastico", the first place was taken by a tenor from Modena by the name of Scaltrity (and this really upset the singer very much). At the same time, she still attracted the attention of many classical musicians with her performance. One of them is the conductor Ricardo Muti. He eventually invited Bartoli to audition for Teatro alla Scala in Milan (Muti was its artistic director at the time)
The influential German musician Herbert von Karajan also became interested in the talented girl. Cecilia sang several arias in front of him, and ultimately the maestro decided to give her the opportunity to perform Bach's Mass in B minor with his orchestra. Alas, the death of Karajan prevented this performance from taking place.
Bartoli also received some support from Ray Minshall, Decca's repertoire manager, and Christopher Raeburn, the studio's producer. The singer has been working with the Decca label for about three decades, more than twenty of her solo records have been released on it.
Cecilia Bartoli's career in the nineties and early 21st century
By the age of 25, Cecilia Bartoli became very famous - in just a few years she managed to conquer the most prestigious opera houses on the planet and become the leading performer of works by Mozart and Rossini.
In the summer of 1990, Cecilia Bartoli made his US debut at the Mozart Festival in New York. This was followed by a rather successful series of concerts on American university campuses.
The following year, 1991, Cecilia made a brilliant debut at the French Opera Bastille in the form of Cherubino in Mozart's opera buffet The Marriage of Figaro.
Also in the 1991-1992 season, Cecilia gave concerts in Switzerland, Austria, Canada, and also in English London (here she had the opportunity to sing at a venue such as the Barbican Center).
On March 2, 1996, Bartoli performed at the New York Metropolitan Opera in a production based on Mozart's immortal work All Women Do. The audience showed great interest in this production, which was explained, in particular, by the stellar composition of the participants. In addition to Bartoli (she played the role of Despina), performers such as Suzanne Mentzer, Carol Vaness and Thomas Bowes Allen were involved.
In her albums of the late nineties and early 2000s, Cecilia Bartoli introduced connoisseurs of opera vocals to the works of composers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (Caldara, Vivaldi, Handel, Scarlatti, Porpora, Salieri, Steffani, Gluck, etc.), focusing on the little-known, almost forgotten in our time arias. The singer did a really great job of popularizing baroque and early classicism music. Largely thanks to her efforts, baroque music again became fashionable.
From 2007 to 2009, Cecilia Bartoli gave a series of concerts dedicated to the bicentennial of the opera legend, the famous Spanish vocalist Maria Malibran (1808–1836). Within the framework of the Maria project, a CD album of the same name and a DVD with Bartoli's concert in Barcelona were released. In addition, a little later, a recording of Jacques Halévy's opera "Clari" appeared on DVD, where Bartoli (like Malibran once) got the key role.
It is also worth noting that in the fall of 2009, Cecilia once again turned to the baroque style, publishing a disc called "Sacrificium".
The singer's creativity in recent years
In 2012, Cecilia Bartoli was appointed Artistic Director of the Salzburg Festival of the Holy Trinity. And she was able to make this event a success. In the same 2012, the level of ticket sales for the festival reached 96%, and the income amounted to more than 1 million euros.
Bartoli is still running this festival. And every year his program includes at least one opera production, in which Bartoli herself takes part. So, for example, in 2012, within the framework of the festival, Handel's opera Julius Caesar was staged, where Cecilia splendidly performed the part of Queen Cleopatra. In 2013, Bartoli appeared in a production of Vincenzo Bellini's opera Norma, in 2014 in a production of Rossini's opera Cinderella, in 2015 in a production of Iphigenia in Tauris by Gluck, and in West Side Story in 2016 »Bernstein. Her participation in Handel's opera Ariodante (2017) was especially striking. Here the singer appeared in the form of the main character - the noble bearded knight Ariodantus.
It is also worth noting that Cecilia has released a number of noteworthy albums in recent years. In 2012, the album "Mission" was released, in 2013 - the album "Stabat Mater", in 2014 - the album "St. Petersburg”(it is a collection of arias from the works of the court composers of Catherine II and other Russian empresses of the 18th century), in 2017 - the album“Dolce Duello”, in 2018 - the album“Vivaldi”.
Personal life facts
For many years, Cecilia Bartoli was in a relationship with the Swiss singer, winner of several prestigious competitions, Oliver Widmer. And in 2011, she officially became his wife. Widmer is also a well-known personality among opera lovers. He tours the world quite actively and performs, among other things, parts in operas by Mozart ("All women do this", "The Magic Flute") and Strauss ("Capriccio", "Ariadne auf Naxos").
For a long time, Cecilia with loved ones alternately lived in Rome, then on the shores of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. And a few years ago she became a subject of the Principality of Monaco (like many other VIPs, she adopted the citizenship of this tiny country in order to get rid of the excessive tax burden at home).
It is also known that Cecilia Bartoli had an older brother, Gabriele, to whom she was very attached. In 1997, he died of brain cancer, and because of this tragedy, the singer interrupted her career for some time.
