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No Way to Treat a Lady Philadelphia
Academy of Music
04/04/2008 - and April 6, 9, 13, 16 and 18
Vincenzo Bellini: Norma
Eric Owens (Oroveso), Philip Webb (Pollione), Dominic Armstrong (Flavio), Christine Goerke (Norma), Kristine Jepson (Adalgisa), Allison Sanders (Clotilde)
Richard St. Clair (Costume designer), Boyd Ostroff (lighting designer), Tom Watson (wig and make-up designer), Elizabeth Braden (chorus master), Opera Company of Philadelphia Orchestra, Corrado Rovaris (conductor)
Kay Walker Castaldo (stage director), John Conklin (set designer)
There used to be an unwritten law in opera: you don’t perform Bellini’s Norma unless you have a Rosa Ponselle, Maria Callas or Joan Sutherland to sing the demanding title role. All three of those divas, along with Zinka Milanov and Montserrat Caballé, sang Norma at the Academy of Music. Renato Scotto was the first soprano to sing the Druid priestess for the Opera Company of Philadelphia 30 years ago. After a lapse of 20 years, the company presented Bellini’s opera again for the dramatically compelling but vocally disastrous Cynthia Makris. Now Christine Goerke is confronting the challenge of singing what the composer called an “encyclopedic” role. On opening night, Goerke proved incapable of mastering the vocal and dramatic demands.
Before she confesses her guilt and ascends a funeral pyre with her faithless Roman lover, Norma sings some of the most challenging music composed for the soprano voice. Goerke's stressed soprano quavered and quivered in the long lyrical lines and could not negotiate the intricate embellishments with grace or ease. Too often, she sang below the pitch. Struggling to sing softly, her soprano was painfully flat in the lyrical cantilena that opens the second act.
Dramatically, this Norma failed to dominate the stage. How could she in Kay Walker Castaldo's muddled staging? Castaldo mucks up Bellini's overture with a mock battle between the Romans and the Druids and a pointless pantomime for Norma and Pollione. The performance goes downhill from there.
John Conklin's set - two enormous rock walls flanking a pile of stones and a raked playing space - looks ugly in Boyd Ostroff's amateurish lighting. At the climax of the first-act trio, Ostroff flashes the lights on and off and, at one point, puts the stage in total darkness as the singing continues.
Castaldo messes up almost every scene. Why is Pollione held captive and threatened with a sword by Oroveso before Norma enters to sing “Casta diva”? Why do Norma's children interrupt their mother as she rounds on her lover and the young priestess he has seduced? Why, indeed!
One can also ask why the Opera Company of Philadelphia is producing an opera it cannot cast or stage. Corrado Rovaris leads a brisk musical performance and, thankfully, opens none of the traditional cuts. Neither the smallish orchestra nor the undermanned chorus produces the quality or quantity of sound this sublime score demands.
Like the soprano singing the title role, the other lead singers add no vocal distinction to this Norma travesty. Philip Webb's lyric tenor lacks power in the lower middle range where much of Pollione's music lies. His tone loses its quality as he forces his voice through Pollione’s aria. Kristine Jepson's mezzo-soprano sounds unmemorable and does not blend with Goerke's soprano in the duets for Adalgisa and Norma. Eric Owens' once promising bass sounds forced and ungainly in Oroveso's grand arias.
Robert Baxter
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