2023-06-05 04:03:25
The decor is as spectacular as it is photogenic. It seems to overwhelm the nice little Arts-Déco room with its disproportionate gigantism. Graphic, with a pitiless whiteness, reminiscent of the time when Norman Forster put white squares everywhere or of the hygienist buildings that Henri Sauvage covered with immaculate earthenware, it is reflected on a shiny black floor, very Busby Berkeley and 42nd Street. A colossal installation, elegant and overlit like a jewelry store window, it encloses the stage on three sides, implacably, and goes up to the hangers. On occasion it can open through a large door in the distance on a gigantic Moon, rise from the ground, and close on the fourth side, when an equally orthogonal, obsessive, prison gate descends.
Symphony in white major
All the more incongruous in this immaculate decor (it will have been noticed that we try at all costs to avoid the inevitable hospital comparison), an enormous trunk, with pruned branches, but with sprawling roots, a shaggy, telluric, stubbornly concrete form , descends from the hangers, climbs back up, descends again. It is the oak, of course, suggesting some earthly religion, imperative and mysterious.
The hymn to architecture will continue with the appearance carried by lictors of a model, obviously white, of the Pantheon of Hadrian, and by the appearance descended from decidedly inexhaustible hangers of a half-dome of the same temple. and its colonnade. And, indeed, what could be more Roman than this monument which has come down to us, enigmatic and intact, and which was once dazzlingly white and pure when in Gaul, shaggy mustached breeches, saillons and brogues plowed the soil.
The Gauls of Lausanne are immaterially elegant. Long black coats cover their immaculate white costumes, like Sufi dignitaries, and they gather under the oak tree around the high priest Oroveso, whose hieratic silhouette evokes more the Amarna cult of Aten than that, Saxon and forester, of Irminsul .
They evolve in this decor, on a slow and vague choreography, sometimes line up along the walls, come together to invoke the protective trunk of their waving hands.
But sometimes it is the Romans who appear in this electric clearing, dressed in strict tunics whose embroidered sleeves are distantly reminiscent of the copper reflections of breastplates.
So what ? we will ask. And then, not much. The staging will hardly make use of this beautiful decor. The walls will go up and down, and the sometimes outrageously violent lighting (thus illuminating the room as much as the stage in an uncomfortable face-to-face between singers and spectators observing each other as under an operating light…) will sometimes take on amber colors, for no obvious reason. There are a few fantasies, some comical, like Pollione appearing through a trapdoor, or more unpleasant, like the appearance through the same trapdoor of a Plexiglas box imprisoning Norma’s two children, or frankly conceptual, like in the second act the invasion of the stage by letters of various sizes with which the children will play to compose in a bluish light either the name of Norma, or Roma, or Amor…
Aesthetics and decorum
To tell the truth, we had found the aesthetics of Stefano Podaauthor here of the scenography, costumes and lights, much more convincing in his recent alcina on the same stage. Perhaps the kingdom of the magician lent itself to it better than the Romano-Celtic exoticism of the libretto by Felice Romani. Moreover, the main part of Norma is he in this picturesque romantic, inspired by a tragedy by the well-forgotten Alexandre Soumet? The story could take place in a salon in 1831: the drama of a man who, after having two children with his wife, wants to run away with her best friend. The poison would replace the stake and it would be Balzac.
Two similar stamps
In the end, all that counts are the passions that play out there: betrayed love, flouted friendship, the desire for death. Everything that the music and the voices carry. The rest is just decorum.
At the center of the drama are the two women, whose twinship this production insistently emphasizes. Dressed one in white, the other in black in the first act, and conversely in act 2, Norma and Adalgisa resemble each other in dress, figure, similar hairstyle, and even voice, and this last point is the most disconcerting: two similar timbres where we are used to hearing a dramatic soprano and a mezzo-soprano, or at least a soprano with a fleshier timbre. This vocal proximity has interesting psychological consequences: the druidess who celebrates the cult of the chaste goddess, the Casta Diva, has betrayed her vows of purity; she has become a wife and a mother, and only a difference in age distinguishes her from the young priestess. It is therefore to a double of herself that Norma will entrust her children. What we gain here in dramatic richness, we lose in musical richness.
Fruity, momentum, a very present sound
The musical richness, in any case, is very present from the beautiful opening, thick, fruity, full of accents and momentum. Diego Beans likes to make this music sound, which he constantly enlivens with a verve that is both popular and elegant, between dapper woodwinds and voluble strings in the allegro part. And theLausanne Chamber Orchestra is there in its time of predilection.
Just as precise, solid, firm will be the first chorus “Dell’aura tua profetica”, responding to the sepulchral, telluric timbre of Oroveso, the young Danish bass Nicolai Ellsberg, with a stature as imposing as its sonic power (and its air with the chorus, “Guerrieri! A voi venusme!”, in the second act will be very beautiful in musical line and feeling). If the movements of the always excellent Lausanne Opera choir will sometimes seem erratic to us, on the other hand his incisiveness, the depth of his palette and his projection will never be lacking under the direction for the first time of Donato Sivo.
Very nice interpretation too, that of Pollione by Paolo Fanale, true lyrical tenor, and the more we advance in the performance, the more we will be convinced by the richness of the timbre, the flexibility of the phrasing, by this broad, homogeneous, warm voice. We would like the direction of the actor to help him a little more, to suggest gestures and movements, but he makes up for it with his sincerity and we will see it in the sublime final duet, where alone on a now empty stage Norma and he can let himself be carried away by the music. Pollione has here a double both physical and vocal in Flavio embodied by Jean Miannayto which Bellini offers hardly any notes to express himself, it is true…
A somewhat careless direction of actors
It seems indeed that Stefano Poda did not attach much importance to directing his singer-actors who, like the choristers, sometimes seem to play in all four corners. Let’s put in the chapter of amusing ideas by dint of being incongruous that of sitting back to back Norma and Adalgisa, like the two pieces of a bookend for their great duet of the first act. No doubt a way of signaling that they mirror each other, but which hardly helps them to make their voices soar.
Bizarre and enigmatic also the jerky, mechanical gestures of the druidesses when they enter and which we say to ourselves must be the stylization of picking mistletoe, especially since, just afterwards, Norma and they seem to be holding a object (absent) which could be the tabernacle where they would collect it, modernist and virtual transmutation of the wicker baskets of which the booklet speaks… the mind is surprised to float in the undecided…
Bel song or country?
And then there is Bellini. His unique way of expressing all the interplay of passions through long melodies, the colors of harmony, discreet orchestration. A flute here (“Casta Diva”), a clarinet or beautiful melancholy horns elsewhere are enough to suggest a climate. As to nice singing, this is obviously the great difficulty. How to reconcile the smooth chant, that is to say elegiac, suspended, in a word hovering, with the distribution of expressive accents, with the drama that is being played out there? We will say that the two singers hesitate a little. And that we sometimes have the impression that in the same air, or the same passage, we are approaching the main Belcantist line but that a more disheveled, less sustained style arises to shake up the lines.
Impression that we will have had from “Casta Diva”, not without liking the power of intense and solidly projected high notes. This impression is reinforced, for example, in the opening aria of Act 2, “Dormono entrambi” (after a beautiful velvety prelude): Norma sings both her love and her determination to kill, like Medea, the children whom she secretly had Pollione, rather than make them live the torture in Gaul or the opprobrium in Rome.
The difficulty is to express this dilemma, rather melodramatic, while keeping the great lyrical style. Challenge not quite met here by Frances Dotto, in the style here a little too bristly in our opinion, but it is true that, dagger in hand, the situation lends itself to it… Impression that we will still have in the aria “Deh! Con te, li priti”, in duet with the Adalgisa of Lucia Cyril, a little disheveled too, besides the resemblance of the timbres that we have said, striking in their unisons. Their duet, so beautiful, “Mira, o Norma”, sprinkled with slightly staggering vocalizations, will end with a lively cabalette, with sympathetic enthusiasm.
The Bellinian ideal
But at other times, in the short duet “Ei tornerà” with Clotilde by Éléonore Gagey (nice timbre and legato in an obviously brief role), we will appreciate a controlled line, then the flame of Francesca Dotto in her overwhelming warrior calls. Terrible role that of Norma, not only by its length, but also because it remains constantly at the top of the range.
It is in the great duet with Pollione, on a deserted stage, where they will stand like two statues draped in black, that we will come closest to a Bellini ideal, in the great phrase on “Pel tuo Dio, pei figli tuoi”, on a soft orchestral fabric (a Diego Fasolis very attentive, as moved as his singers), in the very beautiful line and sensitive rallentando of “Vedi, vedi a che son giunta”, in the pride of ” He will perish in the flames! “, in the insinuating “Nel suo cor ti vo’ ferire”. And Paolo Fanale will also shine at his best in “In me sfoga il tuo furore” prelude to their exciting unison.
On this momentum, the finale will spare some very beautiful things, the notes spun on “L’innocente accusar del fallo mio”, the pride of “Norma non mente”, especially the melancholy of the aria “Qual cor tradisti”, of finally, a truly belcantist color – like those of the tenor, stamped, masculine, radiant in a “Col mio rimorso… Moriamo insieme” of a perfect style. A very beautiful coloratura, as melancholic as one could wish, on “Ah! Father! A prego ancor” will introduce the aria “Deh! Non voleli vittime”, limpid, touching, and an incandescent finale with chorus.
The large white walls will then have disappeared into the hangers, the white ceded to the black of a cave or catacombs, where the emotion sometimes aroused by the opera will rise when suddenly everything seems to come together and we touch on a certain truth.
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