The ascent of Mt. Norma is one of the most perilous in opera. Like the slopes of Everest, opera stages and recording studios are littered with the artistic corpses of women of all vocal persuasions who took on the title role "because it was there." Count among the latest casualties mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, whose new recording of the opera (Decca) nevertheless has a great deal going for it, much of that due to Bartoli's work away from the microphones.
Bartoli has had distinguished colleagues working with her in this ultra-serious presentation of the opera Bellini intended and might have heard. But without her star power, it's unlikely this project would ever have been more than a gleam in historical performance's eye. It's one of those "can't live with her, can't live without her" deals.
To clear the deck, Norma is my personal ur-opera, the first Sutherland recording tattooed on my impressionable teenage ganglia. (It's still as often as not my go-to Norma, though I think Callas' second studio recording is the best of all). These prejudices aside, I've listened to this new Norma numerous times, with unflagging interest and far more pleasure than not.
Then, thanks to enterprising Robert Coles, former director of Cal Performances, Zellerbach Auditorium hosted annual recitals by the young Bartoli, then on the express train to stardom. I'm not the last dinosaur to have heard her then, when the wonder was that this seemingly unassuming Roman girl could conquer with such an irresistible blend of consummate technique and that thing we used to talk about with singers: honesty. At its most spectacular, her singing made it sound easy, not hard, and it was so genuine it decked you.
Decades – and larger stages throughout the operatic world – later, the Bartoli instrument is less pristine, and the character – now vehemently "sincere" – is a disturbing concoction made up of equal parts sage and scammer, with a dusting of madwoman over it all for camouflage. In this century her art has focused on a series of "projects" designed to showcase little-known music or to present familiar music in new threads. The intentions and sometimes accomplishments of these projects are commendable, but there's also been an unnerving sense of a gravely wounded singer sheltering behind unknown repertoire. The Bartoli of old had nothing to prove, nor was proof of any kind needed.
This new Norma, by any measure her biggest project to date, takes as its mission the restoration of one of the few bel canto gems never to have left the repertoire to the notes, style, and sonorities its composer would have had in mind. In that it succeeds powerfully. Working from a new critical edition of the score, the recording also makes insightful use of period instruments and playing – if not quite singing – styles.
The changes and repairs are carefully outlined in the accompanying booklet, but the main one, it's clear, is the restoration of the title role to, as perhaps in the opera's early days, a lyric mezzo rather than a dramatic soprano equally capable of singing Bruennhilde. Enter Bartoli, who's been hammering away at this idea – by no means without substance – with the personal gain to her career clearly showing.
Even with "original keys" (not transpositions) and period-sensitive ornamentation, the music takes Bartoli to top notes where she cannot quite get a toehold. All that could be easily overlooked if the feisty singer weren't also sinning boldly in matters of vocal decorum that have nothing to do with historically-informed music-making. Some of her tones seem produced in head cavities other singers don't even have, and most everything is so overwrought – consonants chewed 20 times before swallowing, and so forth – that any sense of purity, of anything, is out the window. Huffing and puffing sounds like huffing and puffing.
Most startling to most Norma regulars will be a high soprano (an older but wiser Sumi Jo, once a stratospheric coloratura) Adalgisa. It does change things in that primary relationship, but to what degree remains to be seen when the Adalgisa has a voice easier to blend with than Bartoli's. Much the same can be said for John Osborn's monochrome Pollione; rewarding as it is to hear the part sung by a lyric tenor (it would be perfect for Juan Diego Florez, who partnered Bartoli in La Sonnambula), by the time you reach the great final duet, you miss the likes of Domingo.
This historically informed reading of Norma does significantly change the work's complexion, if not its essential character, and the music comes into sharper definition under the reliable baton of Giovanni Antonini. If only our heroine could, like the players of Orchestra La Scintilla, use vibrato sparingly and to specific effect.
If my focus seems unrelentingly on Bartoli, she's invited it. In her own booklet note, she takes swipes at her great predecessors in the role on recording – and then doesn't come up to the gauntlet she throws down: "at numerous points the tessitura of the title role in both Sonnambula and Norma sits more comfortably for a mezzo-soprano than for a soprano." I prefer the low, descending scale on "Dormono entrambi," one of the score's peak "little moments," from Sutherland or Callas any day. This new Norma is the right idea, but the wrong-headed oldsters also knew a thing or two about bel canto, and how to level you with a story of adultery among the Druids.