Singing lifts bleak look

Norma, Opera North at the Lowry
THIS first production of Bellini’s masterpiece in over 20 years comes with warning — well, to singers, anyway.

If the production is ever revived and you want to try out for a leading role, practice singing while rolling downhill, while on your back staring at the ceiling, while leaning forward and cutting off your air supply, while leaning your cheek on your hand and while your long hair flops down over your mouth and covers your face.

Only then will you be ready to audition for what is yet another of Christopher Alden’s odd-for-the-sake-of-it productions.

Luckily, Dutch soprano Annemarie Kremer has clearly done some sort of commando training — including clambering on and around the 35ft tree on slings that dominates the all-wooden box set of floor to ceiling planking, only a couple of high windows breaking the impressive monotony.

Alden’s Norma is moved to a sort of rural Victorian England in which the Roman invaders are top-hatted, frock-coated gentry and the Druids leather-aproned generic hicks.

The whole thing is unremittingly shadowy, even bleak, in outlook and in the last half-hour so the conceit starts to stretch beyond breaking point. But for much of the action it does focus the ears and eyes on what matters, the singing.

And here this Norma, the oft-quoted pinnacle of bel canto opera, is treated well. Urged on by conductor Oliver Von Dohnanyi’s creamily smooth orchestra, the cast rises to the occasion very impressively indeed.

Kremer, who shouldn’t be good in this role — her voice open and wide-ranging rather than lyrical and beautiful — offers a full-intensity performance that dutifully answers the demands of Bellini’s music, complemented very nicely by the deeper tone of Keri Alkema as her unwitting love-rival, Adalgisa. Their long act-one duet is sensuously drawn out and languid, offering a fitting conclusion to a long stretch of tortuously difficult arias.

Not quite so good is Mexican tenor Luis Chapa, whose all-square, non-nonsense voice lacks subtlety and beauty, though can be powerful when necessary. Making up a strong quartet is the authoritative bass of James Creswell as Oroveso, Norma’s father.