MUSIC REVIEW : Mezzo-Soprano Bartoli in Ambassador Debut

Contrary to common perceptions, great singers are usually identified early; vocal late-bloomers are the exception. When voice, temperament and musicality--obviously the principal ingredients in major singing careers--come together, they do so, as a rule, in the very young.

So it should be no surprise that Cecilia Bartoli, the international sensation of recent seasons--as of Monday morning, she had already given two New York recitals, as well as important debut appearances in San Francisco and Chicago--and a first-time recitalist at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena this week, is in her mid-20s. The attractive mezzo-soprano from Rome will not be 26 until June 4.

As she showed Wednesday night before a large and receptive audience, Bartoli’s considerable talents have already been honed and polished. In a Rossini program--that composer’s 200th anniversary arrives Saturday--with pianist Martin Katz, the engaging singer swept all before her in a stylish, gorgeously vocalized performance as charming as it was communicative.

Bartoli’s strong and handsome voice--it lacks that unique, once-in-a-lifetime timbre associated with the Sutherlands, Caballes and Milanovs of this world--is not, as you may have read, “smallish.” Though Katz in a very few moments overpowered the singer, the substance of her vocal equipment is apparently not overlight. And it might, with careful husbanding and appropriate use, grow in size.

At this point, Bartoli uses it with great intelligence, a musicality one can only call instinctive--though that word covers a multitude of conscious decisions--and constant attention to words and drama. This should be a very long, as well as successful, career.

Putting together a Rossini agenda is not so easy; this one worked through the genuine variety and canny pacing provided by both performers.

It began with three contrasting dramatic songs, continued with five of the nearly 300 settings the composer made of the Metastasio’s text, “Mi lagnero tacendo,” an aria from “Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra” and the three songs of “La Regata Veneziana.”

Before the concluding and climactic “Bel raggio lusinghier” from “Semiramide,” Bartoli offered three of Rossini’s French and Spanish songs in very seductive readings.

Semiramide’s most famous aria may have been the capper for vocal thrills and that easy command of coloratura display for which Bartoli may soon be famous, but she had foreshadowed both, earlier on.

“Bel raggio” then took the audience’s breath away, while leaving Bartoli, obviously, with all she needed. It was a master demonstration of dramatic urgency applied to a formidably static piece of music, of tasteful ornamentation, inspired cadenza-writing, textual detailing and telling tone-coloration. And it was all accomplished with no strain.

She followed it, to the great delight of her listeners, most of whom seemed to have no intention of leaving the premises, with three encores: “Una voce poco fa,” from “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” in as joyful and unhackneyed a performance as may be possible in 1992; a wonderfully comic run-through of Berta’s aria, described by Bartoli to her audience as, “another woman, from the same house,” and an Italian folk song, “Tic e Tic e Toc.”

At the piano, Katz became, as always, the perfect singer’s partner: forceful but considerate, musically sensitive, ever-stylish, technically irreproachable. In a very competitive artistic business, it is no surprise that his peers speak his name with awe.