Argerich and Bartoli

Argerich and Bartoli

This Week in Classical Music: June 2, 2024.  Argerich and Bartoli.  For a number of weeks now we’ve been posting entries about composers, neglecting the performers.  In a manner, it’s comprehensible: one way or the other, we worth the inventive expertise of composers larger than that of performers and interpreters.  It’s not instantly apparent why a present from God of 1 kind needs to be thought-about extra necessary than one other, particularly contemplating that, traditionally, this has not all the time been the case, however this can be a matter for an additional time.  Two supremely gifted ladies have been born this week, the pianist Martha Argerich, on June 5^th of 1941, and the singer Cecilia Bartoli, on June 4^th of 1966.  Argerich, probably the most celebrated musicians of our time, nonetheless performs, on the age of 83.  Right here’s a part of her schedule for June of this yr: three performances on June 13^th via 15^th of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto in Rome on the Auditorium Il Parco Della Musica, then a number of concert events in Hamburg – enjoying Ravel’s La Valse for 2 pianos with Sergio Tiempo on the 20^th, the following day enjoying chamber items of Schumann, Beethoven and Shostakovich, and the next day giving a live performance of Chopin items.  And it goes like that for the remainder of the month, nearly daily: Schumann’s Dichterliebe with Ema Nikolovska, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Gil Shaham and Edgar Moreau, some Debussy, Schubert and Mussorgsky, and on the final day of the month, Shostakovich’s Concerto no. 1, for piano and trumpet with Sergei Nakariakov, a Russian-Israeli, Paris-based trumpet virtuoso.  What wonderful vitality!  We want her a few years to return.

Cecilia Bartoli was born in Rome and studied there on the Santa Cecilia Conservatory.  She made her opera debut on the age of 21, and one yr later was already broadly identified in Europe.  Bartoli has a uncommon voice, a coloratura mezzo-soprano, with an enormous vary and distinctive flexibility.  This allowed her to sing not simply the usual mezzo repertoire, equivalent to Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, or Dorabella in Così fan tutte, all of which she did extraordinarily effectively;, she additionally delivered to life Baroque music hardly ever heard earlier than, and nearly by no means carried out on such a degree, not for the reason that finish of the period of castrati.  Right here, for instance, is Bartoli performing two arias from Vivaldi’s opera Griselda.  First, Agitata da due venti (Moved by the wind), recorded in 1998 with the ensemble Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, and subsequent, Dopo Un’orrida Procella (After a horrible storm), recorded one yr later with Il Giardino Armonico beneath the path of Giovanni Antonini.  We discover Bartoli’s musicianship and approach unbelievable.

Listed below are the names of three conductors born this week, Yevgeny Mravinsky, born June 4^th of 1903, who led the Leningrad Philharmonic for 50 years and was an incredible interpreter of the music of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich; an exquisite Mahlerian, the German conductor Klaus Tennstedt (June 6^th of 1926); and the Jewish Hungarian-American, George Szell (June 7^th of 1897), who, amongst different issues, made the Cleveland Orchestra into the most effective on the planet.