UK Edition
Review
Sonya Yoncheva could become one of the most commanding Normas of our time – review
This production of Bellini’s noble tragedy will go down in the annals as the one that transformed Norma, high priestess of the Druids, into the Vicar of Dibley – and a Roman Catholic at that.
Directors Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco have rightly dismissed the original setting of Ancient Gaul inhabited by pious pagans oppressed by the occupation of imperialist Romans: it’s impossible to present such a scenario without falling into Monty Python parody.
But their alternative vision doesn’t carry much internal cohesion or conviction. They imagine Bellini’s opera taking place in a dense forest of crucifixes, redolent of the great Spanish cathedrals. Robes and rituals abound; Norma delivers her prayer to the moon goddess, 'Casta diva’, from a pulpit, as a giant censer swings over the stage; some of the congregation are doomed to the conical white hoods of the Inquisition.
This may be impressive as sheer spectacle, but it scarcely amounts to any sort of coherent reality. Here is a Counter-Reformation sect that appears to have embraced female priests as well as armed resistance. Norma’s secret cave becomes a chic modern apartment, where her children loll about watching Watership Down on a flat-screen television. For the final scene, Norma dons a Dawn French black trouser suit under her clerical gold chains and sits glumly on the altar steps for her showdown with the love-rat Pollione.
This is an opera that can make sense to a modern audience staged either as a monumental exercise in pure neo-classicism or as an emotionally intense chamber drama in the mould of Phèdre or Medea. But Ollé and Carrasco take an almost Bunuelian, surrealist approach that baffles and obfuscates without making the drama seem any more credible or 'relevant’. Their production is, in sum, a muddle, and it’s not surprising that it was desultorily booed.
Fortunately, there were musical rewards. Antonio Pappano conducts with a fine sense of the score’s brash brilliance as well as its sinuous lyricism, and both chorus and orchestra start the new season sounding invigorated. Both the Flavio, David Junghoon Kim, and the Clotilde, Vlada Borovko, make their mark in recitative, and Brindley Sherratt is a properly solemn and fearsome Oroveso.
Slightly disappointing was Sonia Ganassi’s Adalgisa – too similar to Norma in vocal timbre and wayward of intonation in the second act. But after his under-par singing in Un Ballo in Maschera here last season, Joseph Calleja was back in cracking form as Pollione, a viciously uningratiating role of which he never made heavy weather – I’ve seldom heard 'Meco all’altar di venere’ so confidently dispatched.
After the peremptory withdrawal of Anna Netrebko last April, the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva agreed to learn and sing the title-role. This is short notice, and although she already has a strong technique, considerable experience and proven artistry, she is young at 35 to be undertaking such a massive challenge in a major house.
In the circumstances, she does an admirable job, even if her interpretation should only be judged as work-in-progress. 'Casta diva’ was firmly if unseductively projected; its cabaletta 'Ah! bello a me ritorna’ became merely shrill and coarse. In what followed she remained more impressive in bold vocalism than in subtlety, tendresse or introspection: one felt Norma’s rage but not her remorse, at least until an eloquently phrased 'Qual cor tradisti’ struck a deeper note.
Nobody, not even Callas, is ever equally successful in all aspects of this score, but Yoncheva could blossom into one of the most commanding Normas of our time - if she can find a more persuasive staging to enhance her.
Until 8 October. Tickets: 0207 204 1200; roh.org.uk