UK Edition
Review
Norma review - The Met Opera Live in HD: a solid and unpretentious spectacle
With its killer roles for tenor as well as soprano, Norma is notoriously a tricky opera to sing and cast. It is also damnably tricky to stage.
The Ancient Gaul setting, with bloodthirsty Druids plotting insurrection against repressive Romans, is one that directors shy away from: Monty Python and Asterix have between them turned this indelibly into farcical territory, and most productions prefer to frame the drama in an analogous context such as the French Resistance.
David McVicar, however, likes to fulfil the libretto’s specifications and almost daringly, his new production for the Metropolitan Opera attempts a sort of historical literalism, with woad cheeks, hempen homespun costuming and our heroine holed up in a wicker yurt underneath a giant gnarled oak tree.
This may make for a soporifically drab spectacle (designed by Robert Jones and Moritz Junge), and there are surely more probingly imaginative ways of animating a rather modern story about strong women and weak men.
But McVicar’s approach has a visual integrity that makes the plot sufficiently plausible and allows the action to move smoothly towards its incendiary conclusion. It’s a solid, unpretentious piece of work that will bear revival.
The title-role is sung by Sondra Radvanovsky, now generally ranked as the premier American operatic soprano of the day. Her Norma isn’t yet fully realised: she doesn’t suggest the hierophantic grandeur of the High Priestess and there’s imprecision in her coloratura. "Casta diva" was choppily phrased and the scenes in which Norma tears strips off her faithless lover didn’t excoriate.
But it’s a brave, forceful reading, admirably paced and sturdily projected, that builds to a powerfully affecting final scene in which she vividly suggested remorse curdling with revenge until something nobler wells up in the heart-rending imprecations of "Deh! non volerli vittime".
Joyce DiDonato is her deaconess Adalgisa: the blend of their voices in the two big duets isn’t ideally creamy, but DiDonato was as always warmly expressive and sensitively musical. Traces of flutter when the voice is pressured give slight cause for concern.
A nasty mishap with a rogue top note aside, Joseph Calleja’s big, bright and lusty tenor was in good nick as the bounder Pollione, and Matthew Rose made an appropriately saturnine Oroveso. The chorus was awesome in its war cries, and Carlo Rizzi conducted the Met’s superb orchestra in a firmly shaped account of the score. The Met audience’s reception was ecstatic.
No further performances. The Met Live in HD season is in cinemas nationwide