Recordings: Anne Midgette reviews Cecilia Bartoli's album 'Sacrificium'

Cecilia Bartoli is a niche diva: She has managed to carve out a major international career on the strength of a limited and idiosyncratic repertory. This rests entirely on a personal magnetism that can transcend even technical details such as indifferent intonation.

She is such a stage animal that she communicates on some basic level, and this is what keeps people listening.

She has also mastered the art of the theme album; and the theme of her latest is castrati, the gelded male singers who were the ornament of European stages in the 17th and 18th centuries. Any number of CDs have been devoted to this music in the past couple of decades, but Bartoli's is one of the most arresting, certainly visually -- all of the album art presents images of her face mounted upon genderless works of ancient sculpture, at once neutering sexuality and thrusting it into your face.

There is debate about whether this music is better sung by a countertenor or a woman. Neither quite captures the mixture of vocal heft and high-soprano range that the castrati reportedly commanded. On balance, even as someone who is not crazy about Bartoli's singing, I'd rather hear it done by a woman who can muscle down into an alarmingly low register (in Araia's "Cadrò, ma qual si mira") and then rise up into a true soprano, than by a countertenor who can't command the same range of color and timbre.

Bartoli certainly has the latter in spades. Every piece on this CD offers its own nuanced spectrum of emotion, from the turbulence of Vinci's "Chi temea Giove regnante," which depicts a thunderstorm with gusts of notes, to the keening sorrow of "Misero pargoletto," from Graun's "Demofoonte." (All selections on this CD are opera arias, but not from operas anyone in the States is likely to see performed.)

Bartoli has a reputation as a vocal acrobat, and indeed, there are feats on this album of sheer endurance as she spins out vocal lines beyond what one might think is the ability of human breath. My reservation about her singing is that it's not always pleasant to listen to. Indeed, the wildness of some individual passages of coloratura (in the above-mentioned Araia aria) are downright ugly.

On the other hand, she's not aspiring to be pretty, but to be remarkable, very much in the spirit of the castrati themselves. Perhaps I've aged into Bartoli, but I found myself admiring her grit in this recording.