Bartoli was suffering from a bad cold and fever before she arrived in Beijing.

"But I just so have wanted to perform here for a long time. I did not want to cancel the concert. For me it is important to discover the country, to meet the young audience here."

Bartoli loves baroque and pre-romantic music because she began her career with Rossini, Mozart and Handel.

Even though she had high hopes for the performance on Oct 7, she did not expect it to turn out like a "rock concert".

The audience screamed when she walked on stage. It brought down the house after every song. She sang three encores but still could not dampen the applause and sang Rossini's Canzonetta spagnuola again. She played the tambourine, danced and snapped, just like a flamingo queen. Rossini's Spanish tune came alive in her performance.

"You have to be noble and serious onstage," she said. "That is the art you do. This is the responsibility for an artist: to share emotion, to be able to convey emotion. This is what music is about."

When she sang Bizet's La Coccinelle you could hear the sound of beetles.

"That's one reason I love baroque music. You need a flexible voice, like instruments. The voice has to play with the instruments. In baroque music, sometimes you have to make duet with trumpet, or with flute, with oboe or with violin so you play your voice like an instrument. Sometimes, you have to imitate nature. It's fascinating."

Bartoli loves baroque and pre-romantic music, because she started her career with Rossini, Mozart and Handel and then wanted to know who influenced Mozart and Rossini.

She has done many operas but not Carmen.

"A good Carmen is very rare to see. Carmen is a very dark piece. In some recent productions, I saw Carmen with flowers here (she pointed to her mouth), dancing flamingo and smoking a cigarette. I think Carmen is more than that. I would love to do Carmen one day with a director who understands the dark side of Carmen."

The Salzburg Whitsun Festival chose her to be its artistic director last year, on a five-year contract. She is the first woman to hold the position.

"For me it's wonderful to create projects for other musicians. And more important is we must have a theme. The festival is over a long weekend. We have different performances, but all follow a red line. It's a huge success. We doubled the sales of tickets this year."

Next year's festival will be dedicated to Rossini, she said. There will be the comic opera Cenerentola and the tragic opera Otello and some sacred music. There will also be a gala with the theme "from yesterday to tomorrow", with great tenors including Carlo Bergonzi and Jose Carreras and young singers singing together.

She also plans a big dinner concert with great food, "because maestro Rossini was a gourmet. Music and food were two big things for him."

Rossini was a very funny man and cried twice, she said. Once was when he heard Paganini playing the violin and the other time was when he had a picnic with friends, and a turkey fell into a nearby river.

Bartoli had not been to the Chinese mainland before, and said that as a Roman she considers other cities and countries other than Italy young. But after a few days in Beijing, she realized how old it is, too.

She performed in Guangzhou on Oct 13 and was to perform in Shanghai on Oct 19. She said she is looking forward to a concert tour with Chinese conductor Tang Muhai in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Iceland next month.

She traveled from Beijing to Guangzhou by high-speed train. "If not in a rush, I prefer riding on a train to see more of the country and to experience more."

One project she has in mind, she said, is to create a "train of harmony", from Russia, running through Siberia to China, inviting musicians to perform on the train and in towns along the railway line across Europe and Asia, to see the reactions of audiences in different regions. The long journey would be shown on television.

"I should come back to China early with this project," she said.

chenjie@chinadaily.com.cn

( China Daily European Weekly 10/18/2013 page29)