The increasing threat of fascism in recent
years has been a source of concern to anyone who follows the news, and it has
not gone unnoticed in the opera house. The new production of Norma at
the Staatsoper Unter den Linden – one of the key works in this year’s
instalment of their Easter Festtage – was only the most recent staging to
transplant a libretto set in ancient times into an uncomfortably familiar
modern dystopia. Yet despite the intelligent and rigorously considered stage
direction of Vasily Barkhatov, it was the incandescent vocal performances –
notably those of Dmitry Korchak as Pollione and Rachel Willis-Sørensen in the
title role – that gave the evening its sense of occasion.
Norma,
written to a libretto by Felice Romani, has one of those expertly-structured
narratives in which the outsized emotions of its principal…
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