Brilliant Bartoli rescues this muddled take on Bellini
Norma Edinburgh International Festival
The prospect of seeing great Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli as Bellini’s Norma was both enticing and disquieting. It’s one of the towering roles in the dramatic soprano repertory, but Bartoli? She’s a soprano who’s made the distracted sorceresses and betrayed queens of Baroque opera her speciality. Vocal pyrotechnics are her thing, but in recent years she has become just too extreme and mannered.
Still, if you’re going to be pathologically vengeful there’s no better vehicle than Bellini’s Druidic priestess, who falls for a Roman officer, is betrayed by him, thinks for a moment of murdering their children, and eventually immolates herself in self-sacrifice, to purge the sullied altar of her “contaminating presence”. On the psychological level it’s perfect for Bartoli, and she’s persuaded herself the role was made for her.
To do that, the other roles in this production at the Edinburgh International Festival – first seen at Salzburg in 2013 – have had to be miniaturised, vocally speaking, so as not to overwhelm her small voice. In the programme book Bartoli claims this is in line with the original performance in 1831, but her analysis is questionable, and it has some odd results. John Osborn is a charmingly light, soft-toned tenor but lacked the edge to be credible as the caddish (and in this production, thuggish) Roman officer Pollione. Rebeca Olvera threw herself into the role of Adalgisa, rival to Norma for Pollione’s affections but was hampered by her pert little-girl soprano, which seemed more apt for Gilbert and Sullivan than Bellini.
Everything else was similarly muffled, so as not to impede the dominance of La Bartoli. The chorus of Swiss Radio and Television was small in number and made a remarkably feeble sound. And the Swiss-based orchestra I Barocchisti was not on good form. True, their “period” 19th-century instruments conjured some fascinating colours, particularly in the night-time scenes, but they seemed scrappy and ill-at-ease under Gianluca Capuano, who stepped in at short notice for Diego Fasolis.
As if this weren’t annoyance enough, the production by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier was vastly implausible. They set the opera in Nazi-occupied Paris, which at least gave set designer Christian Fenouillat the chance to create a pleasingly exact French 1940s schoolroom, which at night became a lair for Resistance fighters. Péter Kálmán as Oroveso, tribal chief and Norma’s father, sang his first aria from a book, which suggested these fighters were recovering their cultural roots by delving into their pagan past. An interesting idea for a fantasy novel but, as this production showed, impossible to make dramatically plausible.
All this muddled thinking had the intended effect, which was to throw attention on to Bartoli. If she hadn’t triumphed it would have been a scandal, but thank God she did. She conveyed Norma’s confusion and fragility as well as her superb fury, and made the immortal Casta Diva aria tremulous with suppressed emotion, rather than purely chaste. At the end, when Norma and Pollione are abandoned in the “school”, everything miraculously came together. Osborn acquired some emotional heft in his closing heartbreaking duet with Bartoli, who threw off pathological intensity and became noble in her self-sacrifice. As the “Resistance fighters” torched the school in a 20th-century recreation of pagan immolation, a potential disaster had been converted into a triumph – just.