Cecilia Bartoli: Truth in Advertising : Opera: True to her glowing reputation, the young diva brought freshness and vitality to a program of art-songs and obscure arias.

Cecilia Bartoli is--wonder of wonders--as good as her reputation. She’s even as good as her publicity.

As most of an understandably adoring world already knows, she also happens to be bright, warm, charming and passionate. Also astonishing and magnetic.

She is a singer with a voice. More significant, perhaps, in this day of mechanical artistry, she is a singer with a face.

Thursday night, the young Italian mezzo-soprano came, sang and conquered in Escondido at last. Surprisingly, she managed to look really surprised by her instant ovations. The California Center--a handsome, spacious, sprawling, $75-million arts complex plunked amid a sea of shopping mallettes--may never be quite the same again.

If all had gone as planned and hoped, she would have been here last October to serve as stellar attraction at the official oh-so-grand opening of the 1,500-seat concert hall. Illness forced the darling diva to postpone her local debut, however, leaving the lavish theater--it’s really a nice, old-fashioned opera house--to such attractions as Vicki Carr, the San Diego Symphony, the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra and Anna Deavere Smith. Harry Belafonte joins the eclectic parade Sunday.

Bartoli could have won all hearts with an evening devoted to her most accessible hits. In fact, she could have made everyone delirious just by waving a handkerchief and humming “Melancholy Baby.” That’s not her style.

She chose a difficult, discerning program of art-songs and mostly obscure arias. And she made everything sound vital, fresh and urgent.

It is easy to talk of Bartoli’s extraordinary range (she can descend to contralto depths one moment, soar to soprano heights the next and strain at neither extreme). It is easy to talk about her extraordinary technique (she can surmount the most extravagant fioratura hurdles with machine-gun precision, control perfectly rippling trills, float a seamless legato and exquisite pianissimo as if such feats were as natural as breathing). It is easy to talk about the rainbow of vocal colors at her command.

The most striking aspect of her art, however, doesn’t seem to involve what she does so much as how she does it. Bartoli strides out on the stage and conveys the feeling that she just can’t wait to start singing. When she does start, she insists that there simply cannot be anything else of comparable importance in the universe.

She exudes joy.

There are bigger voices before the public today, even among lyric mezzo-sopranos. There are singers who value restraint more than Bartoli apparently does, singers who want to sing more and emote less. There may be times when a purist would say Bartoli comes close to being too cute, too precious.

Forget it. With this artist, even self-consciousness seems uniquely spontaneous. In matters of compulsion, communication and basic expressive generosity, Bartoli probably is peerless. And irresistible.

She opened the first half of her program with intimate arie antiche of Caccini, Scarlatti, Caldara and Paisiello--each a perfectly focused dramatic miniature. Then she turned to the reflective grace of three concert pieces by Mozart and the classic lament of Gluck’s “O del mio dolce ardor.” These led to the exquisite anguish of “Sposa son disprezzata” from Vivaldi’s “Bajazet,” and, for explosive, climactic contrast, the fabulous bravura of “Agitata da due venti” from the same composer’s “Griselda.”

After intermission, Bartoli surveyed--and impeccably differentiated--the various ethnic delights of Ravel’s “Chants populaires,” in tandem with the seductive allure of his “Vocalise-etude en forme de habanera.” Could there be a Carmen in this woman’s future?

She exulted in the romantic nostalgia of four Bellini songs, which served as a prelude to the operatic piece de resistance : Elvira’s mad scene from the same composer’s “I Puritani.” We know it as a showpiece for coloratura sopranos from Callas to Sutherland to Sills. Bartoli appropriated it in a lower version created for Maria Malibran, and, with otherworldly pathos, made it her own.

After endless cheers, with the audience on its feet and the piano heaped with posies, our heroine mustered two encores: Rossini’s “Canzonetta spagnuola” (very flashy) and Cherubino’s “Voi che sapete” from Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro” (very boyish, very lovesick). The crowd left reluctantly.

Bartoli shared her applause, most appropriately, with her sensitive, supportive, stylish collaborator at the piano: Jeff Cohen. His name was printed in tiny, demeaning print among the program credits and he certainly deserved better.

The program magazine, incidentally, was rather skimpy. It offered the usual biographical puffery for the performers, but no texts (only English translations, devoid of context) and no annotations.

The sonic properties of the new hall seemed reasonably crisp and bright, if a bit dry, from Row G downstairs. The stage was cluttered with a network of acoustical towers that looked for all the world like a bad modernist set for the temple scene in “Aida.”

* Cecilia Bartoli will perform a sold-old show Feb. 21 at McCallum Theatre for the Performing Arts, Palm Desert. She will also perform Sept. 21 at Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. (714) 556-2787.