Thanks to Cecilia Bartoli, the Whitsun Festival in Salzburg has become a beacon of free spirit and defensive grace against attempts at political dwarfing of art.
This does not mean that they take place in the midst of the pandemic, but what they do: visualizing meaning without bold updating, transforming existence across identity barriers, strengthening tradition instead of denouncing it.
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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Of course, it's lucky that they are allowed to have an audience on site. In return, you accept to be tested every two days in order to show the fresh negative result together with ID card and admission ticket. But then: Finally the freedom of the unguided gaze again! Having escaped the dictates of the streaming cameras, he can dwell on Mélissa Petit's face to study what traces of the disturbance can be read in it. She plays the “beauty” in George Frideric Handel's oratorio “Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno”. Her crazy look, the tousled hair, the sagging shoulders, sticking out naked from her petticoat, are what matters while Cecilia Bartoli sings.
Certainly Bartoli, with his cheeky coiffure and short hair in a pants suit made of strawberry-colored velvet (designed by Gideon Davey), is the more telegenic figure.
She also shows great courage to thrash the defenseless beauty with a whipping mezzo-soprano and thus make herself the most unsympathetic figure in the scene.
As “pleasure” she appears like the manager of a PR agency, a merciless pimp of media presence, for whom “beauty” is only material.
But while you hear that anyway, you have to see something else: what Bartoli's voice does on Mélissa Petit's face.
Streaked with vocal touch
Finally sound in the room again! Lawrence Zazzo as “disinganno” - in German “disappointment” or “wisdom” - and Charles Workman as “time” pass the audience on the stalls left and right and sing their pale, enraptured duet about transience. In their walk, the offense becomes touched by physical-vocal contact. And finally a togetherness in the hall again! In tense silence you can hear the neighbors swallowing, their mouths dry and their eyes moist, because on stage, carried by the strings of the Musiciens du Prince-Monaco under the direction of Gianluca Capuano, the cruel mega-fairy of pleasure transforms into a wise one Woman of simmering tenderness. Sunk in the most unhappy major, silenced by screaming pianissimo, we all listen to the aria “Lascia la spina,cogli la rosa “, sung by one of the greatest singers who is there, who was there and who will be there: Cecilia Bartoli.