Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Vincenzo Bellini, directed by Kevin Newbury
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
October 6, 15, 18, 21, 23, 26, 28 & November 5, 2016
“A True Diva”
The Canadian Opera Company opened its 2016/17 season with a new production of Bellini’s Norma, a co-production with San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Gran Teatre del Liceu. While the value of the uninsightful physical production is negligible, the opera serves as a showcase for some of the most glorious singing Toronto has ever heard in an opera.
The opera, first produced in 1831, is generally regarded as the finest bel canto opera, a style that emphasizes the beauty of the voice and of vocal display with the orchestra taking the secondary role of accompanying the singers. This would change with Beethoven and especially with Wagner where voices are integrated with the orchestra in an overall symphonic structure.
The plot is set in a grove of the Druids in Gaul in about 50 bc. The Romans have invaded and the Druids have to decide what action to take. Oroveso, Norma’s father and the Chief of the Druids hopes to fight the Romans. However, Norma their High Priestess says to take no action since she received the prophesy that Rome will eventually destroy itself. Her view of the Romans is compromised by the fact, so far kept secret, that she has had an affair with the Roman Proconsul Pollione and born him two children. In this she has broken her vows as a priestess and betrayed her people. To make things worse, Pollione has now transferred his affections to one of Norma’s younger priestesses Adalgisa, who is so in love with him that she wishes to renounce her vows.
As one might expect in an early 19th-century opera, the historical setting is primarily decorative. Librettist Felice Romani presents Irminsul as the chief god of the Druids when, in fact, an irminsul is an kind of pillar, often a tree trunk, used for worship by the Saxons, not the Druids, though no one knows in what way. The opera also assumes Druids practiced human sacrifice, something the ancient Romans accused them of, but many believe that this was part of Roman propaganda used against them. Despite all this, what matters most is the love triangle that the opera presents and the enlightened way Romani manages the relations among the three characters so that, contrary to the normal pattern, the two woman, Norma and Adalgisa, bond with each other against the man who has wronged them both. Then there is, of course, Bellini’s ecstatic music.
To hear Sondra Radvanovsky sing Norma is to be in the presence of greatness. It is a case of an artist at the peak of her powers singing a role that best allows her to display them. Radvanovsky already possesses a beautiful instrument – a soprano full of myriad colours which she uses to bring out the nuances of every line. Her technique is impeccable. Her high notes are effortless, her crescendos and decrescendos on held notes are exquisite, and her pianissimi are absolutely heavenly. It’s no wonder then that the ovation that greeted her “Casta diva” seemed it would never end. As if that were not enough Radvanovsky is also a fine actor. She conveys Norma’s wide range of emotions from rage to jealousy, despair and resignation with a realism none of the rest of the cast can match. Hers is a performance of unforgettable beauty and power.
Musically, Radvanovsky has strong support from the cast. As Pollione, Russell Thomas’s already heroic, Italianate tenor seems only to have grown in strength and size since his last appearance here in Carmen just five months ago. He still shows a tendency to sing in an unvarying forte, but manages to soften his tone for the duet “Qual cor tradisti.” As Adalgisa, Isabel Leonard sings in a pure-toned mezzo-soprano with an attractive brightness of tone. In Adalgisa’s two duets with Norma, Leonard’s and Radvanovsky’s voices blend with ravishing perfection. The singing of Radvanovsky, Thomas and Leonard, whether singly or in combination, was so riveting it brought forth torrents of bravos after every one of their numbers – something I’ve not experienced in Toronto in over forty years of opera-going.
This does not mean that the performance of Dimitry Ivashchenko as Oroveso was not appreciated. His cavernous bass is impressive and and his presence immediately commands the stage, but Bellini’s measured arias for the character seem not to fire the audience’s excitement to the same degree. The COC Chorus is as excellent as ever especially with the war chorus “Guerra, guerra!” almost frightening in its fierceness.
The singing is so involving that one can easily ignore the multiple flaws of the physical production. Kevin Newbury mentions in his Director’s Notes how much research he and his team did into Druid life and practices. Yet, he states outright that they have set the opera “in a mythic, Game of Thrones-inspired milieu”. Not only does he thus admit that the design is derivative but he also appears unbothered that he has debased one the greatest bel canto operas by modelling its look on a popular fantasy television series. Jessica Jahn’s costumes do indeed evoke the television series but thereby miss out on the chance to characterize the Druids as, say, lovers of nature or to distinguish them from the Romans.
Newbury’s principal error is to locate all the action indoors. David Korins’s set consists of a barn-like entry hall of the Druids’ enormous wooden castle (as if Druids even built such structures). A stage-height door rises periodically, apparently on its own, to remind us of the sacred grove outside where the action is meant to occur. One might imagine this size of gate as more suited to the entrance to an inner courtyard, but it is quite clear that when it snows on the far side of the gate it does not snow on the near side.
Also, being indoors allows the female Druids to wear nonsensical faux-medieval gowns that expose their upper arms and shoulders even though it seems that winter has come. Jahn has dressed the men more sensibly for the season though, oddly, with more modern clothing. They all wear work boots and jeans below the waist. Above the waist wear anything from tunics and cuirasses to sports jackets, furs and hoodies. Probably hardest to accept in a design that combines Hindu with Western Gothic elements is that all of the female and some of the male Druids of Gaul wear wigs of dreadlocks, with Norma the only blonde among them.
Newbury’s greatest mistake is his staging of the final scene. He gives us the ridiculous spectacle of Norma and Pollione committing suicide by walking into a huge wicker bull-shaped funeral pyre which the Druids have lit indoors inside their wooden castle despite having such huge gate at hand to push it outside. Perhaps following such foolish customs is why the Druids died out. The best that can be said is that the design and Newbury’s stodgy blocking is ignorable. Unlike Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Don Giovanni last year or Christopher Alden’s La Clemenza di Tito in 2013, Newbury does not try to change the plot of the opera or foist different personalities on the characters. He seems uninterested in achieving detailed acting, but at least the characters interact in a way that makes sense on the story.
Overall, conductor Stephen Lord gives a highly charged account of the score, beginning with an especially vibrant overture. Lord does, however, have the peculiar habit of noticeably slowing down the tempi of the best-known numbers. “Casta diva” for example is not andante as marked but an almost lugubrious largo. That the aria triumphed despite this was due entirely to Radvanovsky’s seemingly inexhaustible lung-power and the sheer beauty of her voice. Whatever the failings of Newbury’s production, to see and hear Radvanovsky sing the role she was meant to sing felt like an extraordinary privilege. Her remaining performances are on October 15, 18 and 21. On October 23, 26, 28 and November 5, another renowned soprano, Elza van den Heever takes over the role.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a version of the review that will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) Sondra Radvanovsky as Norma, ©2016 Chris Hutcheson; Russell Thomas as Pollione and Sondra Radvanovsky as Norma; Sondra Radvanovsky as Norma, Isabel Leonard as Adalgisa and children, ©2016 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2016-10-08
Norma