Norma, Opera Holland Park, review: "dignified and graceful"

The mystique around Bellini’s Norma evokes antique marmoreal grandeur, and a title-role so vocally and histrionically demanding that in living memory only Maria Callas on a good night has mastered it.

But Opera Holland Park’s production commendably refuses to be awed by this penumbra. Grabbing the thing with two hands, the director Olivia Fuchs strips it of grand opera flummery - Druidic processions, Ancient Gauls, trogdolyte priestesses - and treats it as a raw music drama focused on the relationship between a strong woman and a weak two-timing man, trapped in a modern war zone.

On the whole, it works. The Druids and their followers become Romanies or Slavs, herded into a barbed-wire encampment by peace-keeping troops in camouflage fatigues. In this context, Norma can be seen clearly as a political leader, dealing treasonably with the enemy and still dangerously in love with the man who represses her people.

Rarely have I seen a staging of this opera which conveys the principal characters’ conflicted emotions so vividly, making Norma’s final reconciliation with the man who has destroyed her unusually plausible. I wasn’t convinced that the concept had been fully realised (it strains credulity, for instance, that with so much unrest in the air, the encampment would be subject to such ineffectual surveillance), but Fuchs excavates the situation’s psychological essence to a depth that a more “authentic” staging in Monty Pythonish beards and hierophantic robes could never hope to reach.

Sturdily conducted by Peter Robinson, the cast keeps calm and carries on in the face of the manifold challenges proposed by the score. Heather Shipp makes a sympathetic Adalgisa, caught between a rock and hard place, loyal to her sex and clan but fatally attracted to Pollione - aside from Madame Butterfly's Pinkerton, surely Italian opera’s most deplorable tenor cad. After a few problems with his cruelly tricky first-act aria, Joseph Wolverton trod firmly through this nasty role. The chorus sang with intensity, curdling the blood in its furious battle-cry, “Guerra, Guerra”.

But this opera stands or falls by its Norma. Here it stands. Yvonne Howard, handsome of presence and firm of tone, maintains admirable, unfazed aplomb. Perhaps she commanded neither the ideal seraphic beauty of tone for “Casta diva” nor the spitting venom for the first-act finale, but she sings throughout with intelligent, sensitive musicality and rises to the opera’s noble climax radiant with dignity and grace.