Time & Perspective Quote by Cecilia Bartoli

Bartoli is doing something deceptively savvy here: she’s narrating a professional revelation as if it were a love story, and that’s exactly why it lands. “The first time” sets up an origin myth, the kind artists trade in when they want to mark a turning point without sounding self-important. Then she slips in the detail that carries the real cultural charge: she’d never performed with a countertenor before. For opera insiders, that’s not just a scheduling quirk; it’s a boundary line between repertoire worlds, vocal traditions, and the ongoing re-negotiation of what “authentic” baroque and bel canto performance even means.

Calling the experience “magic” isn’t lazy sentimentality so much as strategic shorthand. It communicates the shock of timbre: the countertenor sound can feel uncannily intimate, neither traditionally “male” nor “female” in the way audiences are trained to categorize voices. Bartoli frames that surprise as beauty, not novelty, implicitly disciplining the listener’s response: don’t gawk at the unusual instrument; hear the artistry.

The final pivot - “And he’s such a great artist” - is the diplomatic seal that matters in a field addicted to hierarchy. She’s not praising Daniels as a vocal oddity or a specialist; she’s granting him full artistic citizenship. Subtext: this partnership isn’t a stunt, it’s an aesthetic alignment. Contextually, it also flatters the audience’s appetite for cross-genre “events” while keeping the values old-school: craft, chemistry, and the rare moment when technique disappears into sensation.