English Touring Opera at the Cadogan Hall
27th April 2009
The first thing that happened in this opera was that James Conway came onto the stage and did a speech which he said he hoped wouldn’t go on too long and we should let him know if it did. Well James you’ll be happy to know it didn’t. But the opera, that’s a different thing altogether. Why didn’t it start at 7 like any other long opera? Not that I minded being stuck at this station where the last train had already gone, I thought that was quite cool. But not everyone thinks like that and I was supposed to be at school for 8.30 the next day (like whose crazy idea was that?) so my parents were a bit pissed off. I’m not blaming ETO for this, I’m sure it’s a Cadogan Hall thing but maybe next time James you could be a bit more forceful with them?
Oh and I’m a bit confused mate, why would there be a different audience at Cadogan Hall from the Hackney Empire? Okay yes maybe it’s a posher area and okay yes there are some total moat owners who hang out there but seriously, how far apart are they? 4 miles maybe? You could walk that. And Sloane Square to Hackney Central, that’s not hard. You have to change at Victoria and Highbury & Islington but unless you’re a serious snob and you think you’ll get contaminated or something if you go to Hackney, I’m sure any real opera fan wouldn’t mind going an extra few miles to see an opera.
Apart from that though it was a really funny intro. If there were any real new audience people, as in this was their first opera, I bet it would have cracked the ice a bit and made them feel opera is a relaxed and friendly place after all.
Norma is all about the women. There’s these 2 girls fighting over a bloke except instead of them saying he’s mine so piss off like you’d expect they’re like really nice about it. Adalgisa’s all, you have him it’s fine and Norma’s like, no don’t worry about me I’ll top myself then you can be together. But from watching the two singers you kind of got the impression they were saying all this through their teeth and a bitch fight could break out at any moment.
Bellini wrote Norma for a soprano and Adalgisa for another soprano. This was fine but the mezzos wanted a piece of the action so they started singing Adalgisa so you got a bit more contrast in the voices. English Touring Opera though, they had to do something different. So Norma was sung by Yvonne Howard who’s a mezzo and Adalgisa was sung by Alwyn Mellor who’s a soprano which I thought was really cool.
But Yvonne Howard did fine, her range is so big she can sing soprano roles (like Norma and Lady Macbeth and Fidelio) and contralto roles (like Maddalena and Eduige and Suzuki, well I’d say they were more contralto than mezzo) and everything else in the middle and it always sounds great. She’s actually described as a soprano in the programme but like 90% of the time she’s called a mezzo and it’s more fun if Norma’s a mezzo so I’m calling her a mezzo. But there is this word sopralto which is a mix of soprano and contralto so that’s probably what she is really. She did sing the lower part when Norma and Adalgisa did their duet and I’m pretty sure Norma does the high notes normally but you never felt hang on, this doesn’t work. It was actually an amazing performance, Yvonne can not only sing every note in the female repertory (except top Fs maybe but plenty of sopranos cant sing those) it’s like she can sing in every style too and you can’t help liking her characters no matter how mad they are. So yeah, I thought she was good.
Alwyn Mellor was good as Adalgisa, she sang really well but I was kind of more on Norma’s size but the opera is called Norma so maybe you’d expect that. Even like with Don Giovanni you kind of want him to fight off the Commendatore and go and find some more girls to shag or is that just me? Her voice sounded different from Yvonne’s, she was more like a typical Bellini voice but they blended together really well.
Justin Lavender sang Pollione, the bloke they were fighting over. I thought Justin sang really well but you kind of thought, 2 powerful women like that, what do they want with him? Why not just turn lesbian? Not that I think all girls should be lesbians, it would be fun watching them but I mean, a guy has needs right?
Piotr Lempa was Oroveso, he was cool, you could tell he was the one in charge. Charne Rochford was Pollione’s mate Flavio and Helen Johnson was Norma’s mate Clotilde, they sang in the chorus too. The chorus sounded really good, there weren’t that many of them really but they made a huge sound, proper bel canto stuff.
It was a concert performance because there’s not room to do much else when you’ve got all those orchestra people but apart from the end it was like a staged performance in lots of ways because all the performers were acting, it was really intense and it was all about the characters. It was only really the fire at the end where I was really thinking, it would be better if I could see that. You didn’t need a temple or the mistletoe or any of that, even when Norma was going to kill her children you didn’t need to see them, Yvonne Howard made you believe they were there. But the end didn’t quite work for me, everything else was done so powerfully and an imaginary fire didn’t quite measure up. I didn’t mind really though, unless you’re Hairy you’d got more than your money’s worth by then hadn’t you?
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