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Poor Naples. It’s always been an edgy place, beset by decades of mafia intimidation and endemic corruption, but now a modern scourge adds to its woes: graffiti. It’s everywhere. Nothing escapes its vile reach. Serene churches, ancient monuments, shop fronts, even lampposts are splattered with a lurid palette of spray-paint vomit. Standing proud in the middle of a piazza named in his honour is a statue of Vincenzo Bellini, and he too is adorned with senseless slashes and squiggles, perpetrated by someone no doubt oblivious to the central part that music has played in the history of this battered and bruised city.

Had the guilty ‘artist’ walked towards the sea in March this year he or she might have noticed that Norma, an opera by the composer so contemptuously daubed, was playing at the historic San Carlo opera house, a building undergoing extensive external restoration that could soon be offering another tempting target for the defacers.

Giorgi Guliashvili (Flavio) and Freddie De Tommaso (Pollione) | Photo credit: Luciano Romano

Bellini was a man of forthright views, once describing an English soprano as ‘below mediocrity: does not know how to sing, is a sausage on stage’. In a letter he condemned the Milan premiere of his Norma as ‘Fiasco! Fiasco! Solemn fiasco!’, so one wonders what he would have made of Justin Way’s ‘play within a play’ production.

With Anna Pirozzi as Norma and British tenor-of-the-moment Freddie De Tomasso making his role debut as Pollione, Bellini would definitely not have described it as a fiasco, but he might have been baffled by some of the principals moving in and out of on-stage and off-stage character. We in the audience certainly were.

Eventually the Druid ‘theatre’ went up in flames, orange-red under Nicolás Fischtel’s lighting, as Norma and Pollione walked willingly towards their fate.

Way’s production, first seen in Madrid in 2021, moves the action from Roman times to 1831, the year of the opera’s premiere, when Milan was under Austrian occupation and Italians were itching for rebellion. Pollione is an Austrian general who has secretly fathered two children with, it would appear, the actress playing Norma, the leader of the rebels. He arrives in uniform and sits in a box on the side of a stage-within-a-stage to watch her as she rehearses the role of the firebrand Druid, determined to drive the Romans out of Gaul (or Austrians out of Italy). With him in the box is his fellow officer Flavio (Giorgi Guliashvili) to whom he has already revealed his new-found love for Adalgisa, Norma’s confidente.

Norma, finale | Photo credit: Luciano Romano 

And here’s the problem. All Bellini’s spectacular vocal writing cannot disguise the fact that Pollione is deeply unlikeable; a repressive ruler, a furtive father and now an unfaithful cad. It’s not a role that suits De Tommaso, who in the public mind is still the hero who rode to the rescue in 2021 as a jump-in Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca at Covent Garden and went on to great acclaim in that production. At 28, he was the youngest tenor ever to perform Cavaradossi on that stage and the first British singer in that role since 1963.

His powerful Italianate timbre has a nobility that doesn’t suit the scheming, pleading Pollione. No wonder the voice sounded clouded on occasion, with some worrying harmonics creeping into his top register, too. He often sounded magnificent, but I didn’t believe in him for one moment.

Pirozzi, whose ‘Casta Diva’ in Act 1 was workmanlike but unremarkable, understandably struggled to maintain the illusion that she was playing an actress playing Norma, despite us going backstage to her dressing room, where Adalgisa, impressively sung by mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova, confesses her love for the wretched Pollione. Their subsequent duets were beautifully handled, with sensitive direction from conductor Lorenzo Passerini.

Anna Pirozzi (Norma) and Ekaterina Gubanova (Adalgisa) | Photo credit: Luciano Romano

Movement director Jo Meredith had a tough job herding so many beardy Druid robe-wearers about on their limiting ‘stage’, even though designer Charles Edwards gave it an impressive set, complete with convincing woodland. Eventually the Druid ‘theatre’ went up in flames, orange-red under Nicolás Fischtel’s lighting, as Norma and Pollione walked willingly towards their fate.

And talking of fire, Italian opera houses are required to have firefighters on duty, visible to the audience as they enter, making a reassuring presence. However, there is no requirement for them to be audible to the audience. Somehow this message hasn’t reached Naples. I was in a box on the stalls level and twice had to leave my seat to remonstrate with the vigili, whose animated conversation in the echoing marble corridors threatened to drown out Bellini’s best efforts. I had thought that front-of-house staff would put a stop to it, but discovered they too were joining in the chat at the tops of their voices. Mamma mia!