Cecilia Bartoli

and the Orchestra

of the Age of Enlightenment

At Roy Thomson Hall

in Toronto on Tuesday

Opera fans love to compare current singers with those long out of circulation, often for the mournful pleasure of proving that the golden age is past. Cecilia Bartoli turned this game on its head on Tuesday, by exhuming an insanely difficult aria from the private collection of one of the most celebrated singers of the 18th century.

Riccardo Broschi's shipwreck aria, Son qual nave, was a favourite show-stopper for Broschi's brother, the castrato Farinelli, whose singing defined the coloratura style of his time.

We'll never know just how he sang his brother's custom-made work, but after Bartoli's bravura performance, it seemed impossible that he could have done it any better.

Bartoli has put some amazing stuff on record, but there's nothing quite like hearing this mezzo-soprano tear through a virtuoso aria in a live performance. A BMX biker flying down the side of Blackcomb Mountain couldn't be more fearless. Both in Broschi's aria and in Vivaldi's Anch'il mar, another shipwreck ditty, Bartoli raced through the spikiest passages with great vigour and no apparent strain. At the end of each horrifying run, she looked more refreshed than relieved, several times breaking into a good-humoured grin.

At the other extreme, she took a dead-simple adagio tune by Giovanni Bononcini (Ombra mai fui) and moulded it into a seamless, pastoral lullaby. Like Farinelli's furious show-off numbers, this was vocal music at its most naked, with no chance of covering any fault in the voice.

All aspects of Bartoli's art came into force during a pair of lengthy dramatic pieces by Vivaldi and Gluck. The stock pastoral romance of the text of Vivaldi's Se mai senti became an emotionally intricate catalogue of feelings that seemed to deepen with each note. Bartoli has a way of maintaining high expressive tension even in the quietest passages -- sometimes especially then.

She could also make a sudden change in sentiment feel like a real explosion in the heart. This is no small trick in music that displays its artifice so openly. She did it in the first aria by Vivaldi (Gelosia), radically softening the fierce opening mood for the lyrical central part. A similar shift in the opposite direction in Gluck's Berenice, che fai, was so forceful that when the applause burst around her, it took Bartoli a moment to break from character.

The pocket-sized Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment supported her performance with impeccable skill, and a silvery unified tone. Without her, it launched a superb performance of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's convention-smashing Sinfonia No. 5 in B minor, which was full of the shocks and go-for-broke transitions that have made this composer such an interesting one for our time. A clean yet humdrum performance of Vivaldi's familiar Concerto Grosso, Op. 3, No. 11, suggested that lead violinist Alison Bury may be a better leader than soloist.

There was one crushing disappointment in this sold-out show: the performance of the newly renovated Roy Thomson Hall. Bartoli had predicted, in a statement proudly displayed in the foyer, that the renovation would turn the hall into "a jewel," but this jewel didn't shine for her. Her voice is not exceptionally large, and hall is still too big and too unsympathetic to convey its full richness and lustre. The place has become a much better orchestral hall, but on this showing, it's still a dead zone for recitals.