On track: Diva's drama on the high Cs

By WILLIAM DART

Pity Antonio Salieri for the appalling press he had in the 19th century. Five years after Salieri's death in 1825, Pushkin wrote the play Mozart and Salieri, suggesting that Salieri had murdered his more famous colleague. This misrepresentation persisted through to the film of Amadeus, where he was played by the saturnine and shifty-eyed F. Murray Abraham.

Cecilia Bartoli's new collection of Salieri arias, with the first-rate Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Adam Fischer, may well restore some clear thinking on the subject. The Salieri Album is a classy package with a 65-page hardcover book and the CD itself tucked into the back cover. Its 13 arias, many rescued from manuscript sources by the mezzo herself, reveal a talent unjustly sidelined by history.

The three minutes of the opening "Son qual lacera tartana" should be enough to convert even the mildly curious into fanatical followers. It is a wicked parody of those 18th-century arias in which the hero or heroine is seen as a noble ship at peril in the ocean. Here, she's simply "a battered fishing boat" lashed by a storm. Bobbing about in the midst of all the orchestral rage, Bartoli leaves no scale unfurled; furious in her coloratura, she leaps octaves and beyond with gay abandon. The recording is so terrifyingly evocative that one may feel the need for a liferaft.

There's much drama on these high Cs. One of Bartoli's heroines has a dream in which her beloved is dragged all over the countryside by the Devil.

Another lets it be known in no uncertain terms that she'll have no country bumpkin instruments in her home - only the violins, harps, violas and such that the genteel folks play in town. All of which is brought deliciously to life by both composer and performers.

At times it seems that any sound, euphonious or otherwise, is valid in the service of the dramatic but, when sheer beauty is called for, beauty is given. The final scene from Armida shows the civilising influence of Gluck and, in Bartoli's words, its total simplicity leads you into a world of emotions. Which is precisely what this diva delivers.

* Cecilia Bartoli, The Salieri Album (Decca 475 100)