Opera's Roman Candle Newcomer

By Martha Duffy

YOU MIGHT HEAR HER FIRST ON THE radio, as you're spinning along in a car perhaps. The composer might well be Rossini, and it won't be long before some hummingbird scales and trills fly by. The song continues and bursts into fantastic runs up and down the octaves. Wait a minute, you say, as it becomes clear that this is not just another exercise in bloodless bel canto. The voice you are hearing is fresh and juicy. This singer can make the trills tease, the roulades flirt. She tosses off cruelly difficult music as naturally as if she were chatting on the car phone.

She is Cecilia Bartoli, a stylish Roman of 26 who is a rare creature in the musical world: a coloratura mezzo. The coloratura refers to her extravagant ease with ornamentation; the mezzo gives her a lush tone, darker than a soprano's, and keeps her from ever -- perish the thought -- squeaking. "I have a natural facility for the coloratura," she says. "It was born in here," she adds, pointing to her chest.

Bartoli is right that no amount of coaching can create a voice like hers; one must be born with the raw material. But she was born with more than that. Her dark good looks project grandly across the footlights: a mane of lustrous hair, huge brown eyes, a generous mouth and milky shoulders that enhance a decolletage. She also has temperamental stability and a ready sense of humor. Says conductor James Levine, artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera: "She has extraordinary self-perception, without the narcissism and the rest of the baloney." She will need her level-headedness as her international career, already robust, continues to expand. Everyone wants Bartoli.

The list of who got there early is impressive. For her, there were no years on the slow track, working in small European houses. Instead she was launched by TV, on a show called Fantastico. Managers began calling, and she made her operatic debut in The Barber of Seville in Rome. It was an unusual instance where the singer was the same age as the insouciant heroine. "When I sang Rosina at 20," she says, "I knew I felt like Rosina." In 1987 she appeared on French TV in a tribute to Maria Callas, reeling off the finale of La Cenerentola, roughly the vocal equivalent of a Grucci fireworks extravaganza. The major maestros had apparently tuned in. Daniel Barenboim began working with her at once. "She had wonderful expressive qualities, and her vocalizing was very advanced," he recalls.

Another listener was the late Herbert von Karajan, who asked her to sing some Bach at the Salzburg Easter Festival. The conductor died before the performances, but she treasures the experience of rehearsing with him. "Bach was another world to me," she says. "At the beginning I was always in a rush. Karajan taught me to take the tempo tranquilly, to take a breath. This is something I use for everything." To those names, add Sir Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Chailly -- a stellar fan club.

Bartoli comes from a musical family. Both parents sang at the Rome Opera -- her mother a lyric soprano, her father a dramatic tenor. Her mother Silvana is Cecilia's one and only voice teacher. "She initiated it so slowly and carefully that I wasn't aware of it at first," says the daughter, who also detoured through girlhood enthusiasms for flamenco dancing and the trombone. "The voice," Silvana instructed Cecilia, "must come out naturally, no rigidity or tension -- like yawning." The family is very close, and Cecilia credits her realistic view of the rarefied opera world to her parents' unawed support.

If TV opened the way for Bartoli, her reputation has grown worldwide because of her five solo CDs -- mostly of Rossini and Mozart but also including Vivaldi and Scarlatti. Her just-released CD, If You Love Me, a group of giddy 18th century Italian songs, now tops the classical charts. Not until 1994 and after will her opera career come to full fruition, given the enormous lead time that productions now require.

Her albums capture the qualities that make her recitals sellout events. Bartoli grabs the audience. She sings with her eyes too. In Rossini, who has lavish comic zest, she courts the phrases and the audience as well. She displays, as Levine says, "an exceptional instrument, personality, grasp of the music and the text and, most of all, the ability to communicate all this."

What comes next for this young virtuoso? The opera schedule is daunting: The Barber in Houston next spring, her American debut; Don Giovanni in a heavyweight Salzburg production conducted by Barenboim in 1994; the Met's Cosi fan tutte the following season. Bartoli is happily caught up in her repertory, but her fans, as well as many opera managers, already ache to see her expand it. Why not the big-money operas -- Verdi and, above all, Carmen?

Of Verdi, Bartoli says, "Never!" Carmen has been offered by several houses and turned down -- at least until she is in her 30s. The wise men who hover over her career, like Barenboim and Levine, hope she sticks to her resolve. The fact is that, lovely as her voice is, it is not large. But 26 is very young. It is nearly impossible to predict how a voice will develop; the supreme Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad sang operetta in her 20s. "You must never force," Bartoli insists. "The test is after the concert: Is the voice still fresh so that you could go on and on?" She certainly passed the test with Levine. When she auditioned for him, he let the session run on and on. He was having that much fun listening to her sing.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York