Even though the coaches parked nose to tail in Kensington Gore on Saturday turned out to be delivering middle-aged pilgrims to the shrine of the Blessed Cliff in Hyde Park, there was still a sell-out across the road, thanks to a chance to hear Cecilia Bartoli make her Proms debut. A singer born to charm an Albert Hall audience if ever there was one, Bartoli didn't disappoint, producing performances of superlative technical finish and musicality, and turning what was sometimes unpromising raw material into purest gold.
The programme was Haydn and Mozart; the orchestra was the Concentus Musicus Vienna, also making their Proms debut, a surprisingly belated one for the oldest of Europe's period-instrument bands - Nikolaus Harnoncourt founded them in 1953, when many of today's leading authenticists were still in short trousers. They framed the programme with two of Haydn's Paris Symphonies, Nos 87 and 86 - typical Harnoncourt performances, full of surprises with breathtaking pianissimos and whirlwind attacks, which looked back to the Sturm und Drang tensions of middle-period Haydn rather than forward to the more genial humours of his old age.
Bartoli's appearances were the luminous centrepiece, and even managed to silence those in the audience who were intent on coughing their way through the symphonies. Haydn's Scena Di Berenice, a chunk of a Metastasio libretto hijacked into a concert piece, is essentially rather dull and lifeless, but Bartoli resuscitated it, spitting out the recitative as though it really belonged to an opera of high dramatic quality, and investing the final aria with real, unmistakable tragic intensity.
There was both familiar and unfamiliar Mozart too: Parto, Parto from La Clemenza Di Tito was a model of techique, impeccably ornamented and precise, with Bartoli's polish matched note for note by the obbligato clarinet playing of Wolfgang Meyer; Un Moto Di Gioia, a replacement aria that Mozart provided for the Susanna in a revival of The Marriage of Figaro, was floated as a delicate, lyrical effusion, never overdone. The fabled Bartoli technique was finally given full rein in an aria from Haydn's Orfeo Ed Euridice: the coloratura was dazzling, every run perfectly even, every trill meticulously judged, yet always conceived as part of the musical whole; this was very special singing indeed.
