Search - Beverly Sills, Shirley Verrett :: Bellini: Norma

A fascinatiing "alternative" Norma

B. J. Miceli | Boston, MA United States | 07/22/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"To begin with, I will state that I think that Sills' voice was too light and limited in body and color in the middle to be an ideal Norma.



I will also state that I am a great fan of Beverly Sills and have been since I first heard her voice on LP more than 2 decades ago.



Sills had a complete grasp of the French & bel canto styles, was a sensitive and intelligent interpreter, had excelllent idiomatic Italian & French diction, a beautiful, shimmery voice (especially in the top octave) and a spectacular florid technique. She was an impressaria and tireless advocate for the performing arts and disabled children. A great lady indeed.



Not surprisingly, I enjoyed this recording very much and recommend it as not a first choice, but, perhaps, an "alternative" Norma. One which taken on its terms will delight and move a listener while illuminating this lovely score.



In several instances, she makes interpretive choices which suit her instrument. For example, in the end of the act 1 trio, she sounds hurt, raging quietly through tears, not raging furiously like Callas. Sills simply did not have the volume to pull that off singing over the others, but she made it work. She sings "Casta Diva" in the original higher key. Again, she makes it work and makes a unique impression because her voice was most brilliant on top. Her Norma is less authoritive, than feminine, sympathetic, and warm.



Which is not to say she is passive. In this portrayal we hear Norma as a friend, mother and daughter and perhaps less of a priestess, leader of her people, and bloodthirsty woman scorned. This Norma is clearly the kind of person Adalgisa feels comfortable coming to for guidance, sympahthy, and support. It works for me. There is more than one way to interpret this marvelous character.



There are no ugly notes. No forced tones (although some of the chest tones come close), no wobbles. Sills does not force her instrument by attempting to copy another diva's sound. I think readers know to which diva's sound I am referring and can imagine all those who have tried to copy it. Sills sings Norma in her own voice. It is not perfect, but it is quite wonderful.



For my money, Shirley Verrett is simply the best Adalgisa on records. She sings the duets in the original higher keys and lightens her voice enchantingly, never coming on too strong or like some chesty matron, the way so many mezzos do. She colors her voice like a spinto soprano, not a mezzo at all. Like Sills, Verrett was a mistress of bel canto style. Her legato is silken.



The tenor and bass are both fine. Who really chooses a Norma on that basis, though? The conducting is also quite good as is the recorded sound. But any fan of Norma knows that heart and soul of the work are Norma's solos and the duets of the 2 ladies. Sills and Verrett deliver wonderfully."

Sills' Norma: A Musical Spectacle of Brains over Brawn

The Cultural Observer | 07/21/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"After more than thirty-five years since its inception into the recorded medium, this recording of Bellini's Norma finally makes its debut into CD, a welcome release that exhibits a role that America's operatic grand dame Beverly Sills had championed during her illustrious career in the performance arts. What makes this such an exciting event for opera lovers is the fact that Sills was a member of the legendary triumvirate (Callas, Sills, Caballé; quartet, if Joan Sutherland counts) of bel canto divas who spearheaded a musical movement that unearthed these treasures from their dusty graves, thereby allowing audiences to realize the serious depth behind this music.



Of these three, it was Callas who promulgated the image of the tragic heroine through her deeply pathos-drenched performances, never once missing an innately embedded textual detail that were produced in tandem with precise vocal abandon. Caballé unleashed a limpid and honeyed wave of vocal undulations that at times could undermine her dramatic commitment. And then there was Beverly Sills, a coloratura soprano extraordinaire who commanded such dexterous vocal chops and yet evinced a penchant for an intelligent histrionic acumen comparable to that of La Divina. Sills neither had Callas' strangely dark yet alluring metallo, nor did she possess Caballé's creamy instrument; yet one thing that she boasted as a dramatic artist was intelligence and elegance. A tragic panther of the stage like Sarah Bernhardt or Callas, she was not; and Grecian in her approach (if Homerian is a word that can be applied to the painting of an operatic soprano's art) she wasn't either. Rather, one can ascribe qualities of a Shakespearean ilk to her dramatics (a deeply studied exposition on character, the intelligence and authenticity of her gesticulations, her vocal and verbal nuances).



Admirers of Beverly Sills are fortunate to have video access to her seminal portrayal of Donizetti's Elizabeth I in his opera Roberto Devereux. If we are to believe what we are told in memoirs and biographies, Sills apparently devoted herself to long and arduous hours in public libraries researching the life of England's most influential monarch. What came of it was a work of art that emulated courtly gestures that were at once regal, on another note tragic, and lastly, musically and textually synchronized so as to create a portrait of a powerful woman rendered vulnerable by very human emotions. In fact, critics dubbed this role as the pinnacle of her career. Roberto Devereux was one of the trio of Donizetti operas culled together by fanatics of the composer's music as part of the "Three Queens" trilogy, all recorded by the soprano to definitive status. Despite the fact that the demands of Elizabeth's music diminished her voice, what with its complex fioritura passages, its testing of the instrument to its extremes, and the infinitely harrowing gravitas, she nonetheless graced the operatic stage with such an intense portrayal of the character that the listener, through her rare skill of vocal acting alone, could easily draw on the serious depth awarded by this music.



Madame Sills' rise to fame accompanied several prestigious engagements in Europe and the United States, yet she was never appreciated at the Met during her brief vocal prime, having exhausted it by the time she emerged to the spotlights as the country's homegrown prima donna. Memorable was she for Pamira in Rossini's L'Assedio di Corinto, Lucia in Donizetti's eponymous opera, and various other roles that were serviced by her kind of voice--light, lilting, and rapid in its negotiations of vocal pyrotechnics. In more "serious" operas such as Bellini's Norma, Sills did not receive the accolades that an artist of her stature deserved. Her voice was two shades too light, robbing her of the gravitas that audiences of the day had been tempered to by singers with heavier equipment like Callas, Caballé, and Sutherland [the most Wagnerian-endowed of the three (she has aspirations to become the new Kirsten Flagstad until that fateful meeting with Sir Richard Bonynge), yet the most lamentably boring too]. Therefore, this recording had since languished in Westminster's vaults.



Critics had panned this "American Norma" as a lugubrious and tiresome account of this cornerstone bel canto opera, but another listen to it during a time when modern sopranos couldn't even chirp their way gracefully through the music reveals treasures about it that many of us had overlooked during a time when the operatic world was blessed with a plethora of great sopranos. Indeed, the only singer to my mind who could cope with the demands of Bellini's sacerdotal Druid is the Italian diva Mariella Devia, who had sworn off the role in order to preserve a voice assiduously extended into a fruitful longevity by a steady diet of lighter, less exposed roles. Thus, as a result of this dearth of well-endowed sopranos, perhaps it is nigh time to reconsider the merits of this recording.



Were musical criticism weighed on the merits of vocal endowment alone, this recording would most likely fail to please connoisseurs by merit of Ms. Sills' light instrument. It tends to waver and turn sour under pressure, and her plumbing to the bottom depths (a weakness for singers of her Fach) is evidence that she was not naturally predisposed to singing the part. However, Sills, the plucky and resourceful American diva that she is, manages to draw out some rather plaintive phrases and titillating roulades that only she can will out of the score with dramatic verisimilitude and sincerity.



Sills' essaying of Norma's prayerful soliloquy, "Sediziose voci...Ah, bello ah me ritorna!", captures her at her best, evincing a voice that could scale all the notes with a few added embellishment while keeping in with the solemn nature of the piece. Her duets with her Adalgisa, the dusky mezzo Shirley Verrett, find the soprano in her natural element, rendering phrase after molten phrase of tender assurance and forgiveness that a voice like hers can express with the greatest ease. When Bellini's score calls for a bit more bite, as in the revenge trio and her tirades against her faithless lover, Pollione, Sills can muster a phrase that lacks only the weighty iron of her darker-voiced contemporaries. The last act is Sills' own artistic tribute to the tragic heroine. If it doesn't quite scale the grandiose heights that Maria Callas achieved in her apex interpretation of the role, Sills still manages to make it interesting and tragic. Her "Deh! Non Volerli Vittime" drowns the listener in such wrenching pathos that few others after her could aspire in their careless twiddling with the role.



Little more praise needs be showered on the mezzo Shirley Verrett. She is an Eboli par excellence, as is she an indomitable Amneris and Azucena. As Dalila is Saint-Saëns's opera, few others could match the shadowed tones of her voice and its richly seductive allure. While the nature of her instrument can sometimes give the illusion of her domineering Norma, she acquiesces to the high priest in deference and capably creates a sympathizing portrait of a distressed junior priestess torn between love, loyalty, and faith. Verrett was later a Norma of distinction, merited by the extensions of her instrument to soprano, but as Adalgisa, only Fiorenza Cossotto and Christa Ludwig besides her could create such compelling sketches of this secondary character.



Enrico di Giuseppe is a serviceable tenor without any special qualities in the part of Pollione, while Paul Plishka blunders his way through Oroveso without the sensitivity or the patriarchal authority that a bass like Nicola Zaccaria or Nicola Rossi-Lemeni could unleash in spades. The John Aldis choir is in its usual disciplined self, while the New Philharmonia Orchestra is virtuosic in its execution of Bellini's orchestral music, if devoid of the Mediterranean filigrees so apt in this repertoire as put forth by the La Scala orchestra.



James Levine, then the rising wunderkind who had not been afflicted by his stodgy, quasi-Wagnerian, "one-sound-fits-all" approach, rounds his musical forces in a slightly veristic approach undergirded by the supple sounds of the London NPO. This is not a brilliant Italianate realization in the grain of Tullio Serafin (bel canto master without par), of course, and while Levine was far more gifted in bringing out nuances in Verdi, his Norma is ably directed and briskly propelled, thus creating an excellent dramatic specimen of this 18th century opera that, while never once coming to the heights of Callas' classic recordings, basks listeners in a project that beautifully services Bellini's music. A welcome rerelease it is indeed, not only for the reintroduction of the recently departed Beverly Sills' lately unearthed artistic endeavors; but more so as an invaluable addition to the Norma discography chronicled during the last century's artistically fecund bel canto revival.

"

A fabulous Norma, by a great Diva.

Daniel G. Madigan | Redmond, WA United States | 07/22/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Beverly Sills' Norma stands alone, as do her other operatic recordings. This recording comes out of her perfomances in Boston with Beverley Wolf( her Aldagisa ) and the change in mezzo soprano was wise, as Shirley Verrett meets the consideraable demands of this most difficult music with her characteristic art. Sills here, places her voice in a mode closer to her Roberto Devereaux Elizabetta, leaning more toward the dramatic grain, rather than the lighter coloratura roles, such as Manon and Maria Stuarda. This interpretation is one that relies vocally on resignation to fate, despair at the loss of Pollione (sung by Enrico Di Giuseppe , in better form than I recalled),shock and hate over the admissions of Adalgisa, and a desire to have both Pollione and Aldagisa pay for their betrayal, a vendetta that includes the deaths of her two children by her own hand, the Medea story all over again.



Sills captures in her voice the horror of even thinking of killing anyone,especially her own children, and she interprets her character of High Priestess in this way, a woman defiled, and yet untrue herself to her vows, a sacriledge to her community of believers. Her sense of the madness of it all is always present, and while not dramatically harmonious with the numerous forte passages, as with Maria Callas (noone can surpass Callas),

Sills brings her own special pathos to events as they unfold throughout the course of the opera.



I do see where the "gravitas" is lacking, and where the Roberto- Devereaux freedom is not always there (listen to her pirated Roberto D. with Domingo). But she scores very high with her mania to conceal,with her fear of the ensuing chaos she has helped produce, and again in her final resignation, accepting death amidst the rejection, and then, the last minute willingness of her father to forgive her and take the children and raise them...a highly profiled woman exposed, self-denouncing, and finally forgetting Pollione and Adalgisa totally, especially when Pollione entreats forgiveness as he and she both ascend to the pyre. Sills is very strong here, and deeply tragic in her intonation and pacing. She shows us (as did Callas ) that her death means the loss of her children, and also the utter humilation of burning to death with a man who is her childrens' father,he, pleading in a kind of fearful, self-serving way to her for forgiveness. Sills dismisses Pollione with the same rejecting sounds her father used with her prior to his change of heart, and never mentions Aldagisa in the ultimate moments.



James Levine conducts, but he has none of the artistry of Serafin with Callas. He does not serve Bel Canto opera very well, and his second recording of Norma with Renata Scotto proves this. Therefore, Beverly Sills has obstacles with Levine to overcome, and she does, filling in some of those awkward pauses with sighs and extended holds on low and high notes.



This is a wonderful surprise after all these years, with no re-release even on her Digital EMI re-releases. The I Capuletti promised more, and so we have this, through DG.



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