All roads lead to Callas

Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t seem to be all that popular when they are. But Welsh National Opera’s theme for the season of Madness means that as one of the leading exponents of operatic insanity Bellini is bound to turn up, and WNO does him proud vocally, if not in production, by mounting I puritani, his last and for some aficionados his finest opera. Norma seems to me to be clearly superior, certainly as drama. I puritani has a wretched libretto, not only linguistically feeble but also with a hopeless plot. It certainly does contain wonderful music, above all of course Elvira’s mad scene in Act II (she has one in each of the three acts).

It’s roundheads versus cavaliers, but the director Annilese Miskimmon seems to think it makes more sense if the roundheads are Orangemen of the mid-1970s, while the cavaliers are a delusion of Elvira’s. The setting for both is a dreary hall, with the now obligatory old-fashioned central heating and stacks of plastic chairs. When the cavalier hero Arturo appears he looks like an OTT Osric, and it’s part of Barry Banks’s triumph that despite that he makes the role plausible and sings it with all his usual reliable élan; Banks is a veteran who deserves to be more widely celebrated than he is, even if he isn’t precisely in the heroic mould. His Elvira is the young Rosa Feola, an exciting new singer, who once past some treble-style piping interpreted her marvellous music with intensity and flexibility. Any Elvira is advised to listen to Callas’s very first recording, the great aria ‘O rendetemi la speme’, and it sounded as if Feola had and had made it her own. The other main singers, David Kempster as the semi-sympathetic Riccardo, and the two Valtons, were reliable and acted with as much conviction as the piece allows.