UK Edition
Review
A Norma that reveals ENO's identity crisis
With a director, conductor, and three out of its four principals hailing from the US, this production of Bellini’s Norma offers further evidence that English National Opera – yes, that is English, and National – has lost its identity and sense of purpose.
A few foreign guest artists should always be welcome, of course; but this wholesale reliance on American imports is just laziness (or worse) on the management’s part. In all the current hullabaloo about cuts and the way forward, I just hope that someone in power is also thinking hard about what ENO’s responsibilities are towards musicians trained in this country, to some extent at the taxpayers’ expense. I make no apology for raising this issue for the umpteenth time: it matters vitally.
Norma has never been performed by ENO before, and despite George Hall’s honest new translation, it sounds awfully churchy and pompous in hymnal English (“o grievous pain”, “the victims of my ill-fated error” and so forth). The greater dignity of the original Italian must be one reason I liked Christopher Alden’s staging so much more when it was first shown four years ago at Opera North.
Transferred to the vast stage of the Coliseum, its expansion has entailed a loss of focus and intensity, with several of its more flamboyant gestures greeted with incredulous giggles. Updating the setting of Roman Gaul to a 19th-century palisaded Amish-style community – its cultish devotions centred on a large fallen tree trunk – isn’t such a duff concept, but its success depends on the power of the four leading players to convince us of the blazing reality of their emotional turmoil, not mere grand opera spectacle.
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Here things fell flat. In the daunting title-role of the priestess who has betrayed her vows and become the lover of one of her people’s oppressors, Marjorie Owens sang all the notes (some smudged coloratura in the first scene aside) with richly vibrant tone and unfailingly secure pitch, but not much else. Older readers may recall Joan Sutherland’s Norma, which was similar in effect: the projection of a gorgeously full and gleaming sound, but a prosaic theatrical presence conveying neither the savage vindictiveness of the spurned lover nor the imperious mystique of the consecrated Druid priestess.
Presenting the proconsul Pollione as a carpetbagger type in stovepipe hat and black suit, Peter Auty (the sole Brit of the quartet) struggled as every tenor does to make the character even remotely sympathetic. He navigated his horribly difficult aria admirably, however. As Norma’s father Oroveso, the stalwart James Creswell bore the brunt of the production’s eccentricities, not least his unwarranted presence in Norma’s secret lair.
High marks to Valerie Reid and Adrian Dwyer for their vivid subsidiary contributions as Clotilde and Flavio, but it was only in relation to Jennifer Holloway’s tender and vulnerable Adalgisa that the situation sprung into life. One regretted more than usual that Bellini did not provide the character with an aria of her own.
Why was Stephen Lord from the Opera of St Louis engaged to conduct? He has no egregious association with this area of the repertory and, following a flat-footed account of the marvellously volatile overture, his pedestrian approach to the score showed no affinity for it. The orchestra followed him dutifully.
The chorus, currently unsure of its future as a full-time body, was rewarded by a particularly generous ovation. Perhaps because of its worries, perhaps because of Alden’s histrionic demands, it seemed to me a tad short of its excellent best, at least until it rose nobly to the grandeur of the opera’s climax.
Until March 11, London Coliseum. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org