Cecilia Bartoli: Vive la France

The 30-year-old Italian coloratura mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli is best known in music by the composer the American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne excelled in: Rossini. Her latest album, though, Chants d'Amour (London), is neither opera nor Italian -- but French songs of the 19th and 20th centuries. If good German lieder singing is a rare commodity today, the art of the French song is even rarer. Even in France there's a scarcity of great interpreters of the national heritage. French music tolerates not a soupçon of sloppiness in tone or diction, but within that elegance lies a range of emotions that includes passionate importunity, sly insinuation, and a crucial element of self-dramatization. Now, with this delightful new release, we have another outstanding interpreter of the French melodie. On TV, Bartoli's vivid facial expressions are almost too broad in close-ups. Perhaps more so on this album than on any of her previous recordings, you can see her face in the sound of her voice.

This album includes a wide range of songs by Bizet, Delibes, and Berlioz, plus a marvelous Ravel group that includes folklike songs in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, and even Yiddish. And a song without any words that Bartoli also fills with character. She's lucky in her accompanist, the prizewinning pianist and conductor Myung-Whun Chung, who is both supportive and colorful -- as in the way he suggests the stream that will pull poor Ophelia under its rippling surface in Berlioz's great Shakespeare song, "The Death of Ophelia."

The novelty on the album is a set of three delightful songs composed by the 19th-century diva Pauline Viardot, who created the role of Delilah in Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah. The plain sister of the even more glamorous opera star Maria Malibran, she was for many years the object of the Russian novelist and playwright Turgenev's infatuation.

Bartoli's French -- like all her other languages besides Italian -- is translucent if not absolutely idiomatic. Occasionally her sincerity slips across the border into melodrama. But her recorded voice has a lovely warmth and impressive flexibility, and in this dry stretch for art songs, Bartoli's irresistible vitality is an especially welcome oasis.

-- Lloyd Schwartz