Berti’s voice in the opening scene and throughout Act I was appropriately blustery, with strong high notes. Tenor Marco Berti, who was heard here in 2006 as Don José in CARMEN, sang the role of the Roman proconsul Pollione, who has secretly fathered two young sons with Norma. In San Francisco, Music Director Nicola Luisotti conducted, and he skillfully handled the changing dynamics of NORMA’s famous overture, which swings back and forth from a military march to moments of tender lyricism and back again. Apart from Callas’s famous version, Radvanovsky’s was the finest “Casta diva” I’ve ever heard, and that includes Joan Sutherland’s two performances here of the role of Norma in 19, neither of which won my unconditional favor. Radvanovsky’s “Casta diva” in Act I was impeccably sung, building from resonant chest tones and arching ever higher with perfect pitch and breath control in Bellini’s long melodic lines, without a trace of vocal wobble. Radvanovsky, who sang a sensational Leonora in Verdi’s IL TROVATORE in 2009, topped even that auspicious debut with a glorious bel canto rendition of the Druid priestess Norma. On Wednesday, September 10, 2014, San Francisco Opera presented Sondra Radvanovsky as Norma in the second of seven performances at the War Memorial Opera House. In any case, to have heard Maria Callas sing “Casta diva” live onstage in relatively good voice remains one of my most treasured opera experiences. Weeks later she retired, and never sang in live opera again, although some years later she made a concert tour with tenor Giuseppe DiStefano. Callas then canceled the final Paris performance. Eight days later, her voice strained to the limit, Callas had to withdraw after the scene with Adalgisa that concludes with the duet, “Mira, Norma,” (which closes Act III when NORMA is played in four acts). They give Norma a contemporary setting against a backdrop of a cruel civil war, and focus on the opera’s exploration of the conflict between an individual’s own desires and those of her society – and of religion as a force for unity and for destruction.Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto NORMA occupies a special place in my heart, for on May 21, 1965, as a very young man I heard Maria Callas sing this role at the Paris Opera in what was Callas’s last good performance of this or any operatic role. Directing is Àlex Ollé, of the Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus, reunited with the creative team behind his acclaimed production of Oedipe. This new production of Norma is The Royal Opera’s first in nearly thirty years. But the opera’s dramatic potency rests in its breathtaking ensembles, most strikingly in Norma’s duets with Pollione and Adalgisa, the Act I trio ‘Vanne, sì: mi lascia, indegno’ and the blistering Act II finale. Norma is perhaps most acclaimed as a vehicle for the lead soprano, and indeed Bellini provides some astonishing vocal fireworks for his title character – most famously ‘Casta diva’, Norma’s Act I hymn to the chaste moon, and Act II’s ‘Dormono entrambi’, as she contemplates the unthinkable act of killing her children. After a muted initial response the opera quickly became popular, and is now a mainstay of the repertory. Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece Norma had its premiere at La Scala, Milan, on Boxing Day 1831.
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