Italian Songs: Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Haydn

This was to be the end of the line for Italian word-setting by Viennese composers: once the confident sentiments that belonged to the poet Metastasio's opera seria felt the chill and threatening wind of Enlightenment and Revolution, their time was up. Even we, for the most part, prefer to remember the German-speaking Beethoven, Schubert and Haydn. So it is good to be reminded of their responses to the Italian muse (usually as part of their craft-learning student work) in this particularly well-cast recital. Central Europe, in the person of Andras Schiff meets Italy, in Cecilia Bartoli, to delightful, often revelatory effect. The simple form and undemanding vocal line of Beethoven's little La Partenza makes for a truthfulness of expression which Bartoli's clear, light-filled enunciation recreates to the full. With her warm breath gently supporting the voice's lively, supple inflexion, she reveals Beethoven's own skill in word-setting both here and in two fascinatingly contrasted settings of ''L'amante impaziente'' in the Ariettas, Op. 82. The first, with Schiff's chattering piano accompaniment, points up the question marks of annoyed impatience; the second, in the pathetic mode, sighs through its vowels, leans on its appoggiaturas, and listens to the fluttering of the heart in the little accompanimental figures. Schubert worked with a lighter hand, though the ten Canzone selected here show a wide range of treatment, from the compressed lyric drama of Dido's lament ''Vedi quanto adoro'', in which Bartoli's lives intensely from second to second, to the honied Goldoni pastorella and the thrumming, pulsating serenade of ''Guarda, che bianca luna'', D688 No. 2. A gently, fragrantly shaped Mozart Ridente la calma and a Haydn Arianna a Naxos of movingly immediate and youthful response complete this unexpectedly and unusually satisfying recital. -- Hilary Finch, Gramophone [11/1993]