Patricia Petibon: Redhead

Rosso: Italian Baroque Arias, P. Petibon, Venice Baroque Orchestra, A. Marcon (released on August 3, 2010) DG 477 8763 | 75'24"

Redheads should not be famous only for being crazy, even if some of the most notorious ones -- Achilles, Caligula, Elizabeth I, Lucille Ball, Beverly Sills, Vivaldi, Sarah Bernhardt, Van Gogh, Cleopatra, Emily Dickinson -- are known for their fiery temperaments. For her new album of Italian Baroque arias, French soprano Patricia Petibon plays on the popular assumptions about her own hair color, incarnating some volatile personalities in an astounding range of music, by some of the big guns (Handel, Vivaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti), as well as a few lesser-performed composers like Sartorio, Porpora, and Stradella. We have admired Petibon's singing before: in Haydn's Orlando Paladino and as a flighty Sœur Constance in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. Like her reportedly dynamic Lulu at this summer's Salzburg Festival (even while costumed in lingerie), her success is often more dramatic than purely vocal. Certainly the promotional videos released by Deutsche Grammophon, which show Petibon gesticulating wildly, rocking from side to side, with the face of a person possessed or disturbed, indicate that that side of her performing personality prevailed even in recording.

A recital of assorted opera arias is unlikely to be of much interest to a serious collector, although opera fanatics will surely want to hear this disc. Petibon's sense of drama does carry into the music, as she embellishes her melodic lines with every imaginable elaboration and variation, whispering, growling, soaring to a clear top, and descending to a gravelly bottom. The sense of brilliant dramatic contrast in many ways sums up the aesthetic goals of the Baroque period, and this extravagance, at the service of the emotional punch of each work, is the musical counterpart of the dramatic tenebrism of a painter like Caravaggio. The playing of the Venice Baroque Orchestra is beautifully scaled to these extremes, from a full-bore rhythmic tussle to the gentle accompaniment of lute or therbo. Specialists will also be pleased to read the disc's liner essay, contributed by Philippe Beaussant, the musicologist who founded the Centre de Musique Baroque in Versailles.