Bellini - Norma, at La Monnaie in Brussels

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 28 2025

Conductor: George Petrou. Production: Christophe Coppens. Sets: Christophe Coppens & I.S.M.Architecten. Lighting: Peter Van Praet. Video: Supersauce - Georgie Pin. Pollione: Enea Scala. Oroveso: Alexander Vinogradov. Norma: Sally Matthews. Adalgisa: Raffaella Lupinacci. Clotilde: Lisa Willems. Flavio: Alexander Marev. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

Photos: Simon Van Rompay

This production of Norma at La Monnaie is one that was hit, like many at the time, by Covid. When it was performed in front of an audience, in December 2021, vaccination certificates and masks were required, strict social distancing was in force, and few people could, as a result, actually get seats. (As I remember, in Belgium, the maximum audience per house was set at 200.) It was streamed instead. Now it’s back, with much the same cast - and no pandemic.

Sally Matthews is a regular at La Monnaie, and La Monnaie is where I’ve always seen her, except for the very first time, fifteen years ago, in Mozart’s C-minor mass at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. Three years later, in Daphne, I already noticed her voice was darker and fuller than before. Her Gräfin in Capriccio (2016) was marred by planes roaring over the plastic hangar La Monnaie erected on waste ground during renovation work, though despite the airborne racket, I wrote that her voice was ‘fabulous (...) strong and straight, rich in timbre’ with no hint of particular effort. She was a faultless Tatiana in Pelly’s Eugene Onegin (2023). By the time of The Turn of the Screw (2024), I was even wondering if her voice wasn’t now too big for a chamber opera. A charismatic figure on stage, she ‘put in a powerful, chilling performance. I shivered at the end.’

With these experiences in mind, I was at first a bit taken aback by Sally Matthews’ Norma. Her timbre has darkened so much, taking on such plumminess at the lower end, that the word ‘contralto’ (not even ‘mezzo’) sprang incongruously to my mind. I set it aside, thinking it was too outlandish. But lo and behold, one of the Belgians I usually chat with during the interval came out with it immediately, unprompted. So I wasn't alone. ‘Casta Diva’ had sounded somewhat uneven and strenuous, not actually wrong but not quite right: you couldn't put your finger on a definite issue. Mind you, tackling the diva aria knowing that most people in the house will have every inflection of Callas (my neighbour’s case, for example) or some other favourite monstre sacré in mind, and with a full-size car swinging, pendulum-like and increasingly menacingly, overhead, can’t be a piece of cake.

By the interval, the soprano’s voice seemed to be showing signs of weariness, and I was beginning, so I thought, to see why some people had said she was past the part. But was it, on the contrary, a deliberate, dramatic choice? Sally Matthews is quite a stage animal, with a powerful presence and a generous helping of tough glamour. In the second half of the performance, she seemed transformed: on top of the part and in charge of proceedings. Hers isn’t, perhaps, an all-out bel canto reading of the role, and I know many people who admire Bellini are focused on sheer vocal beauty. She might even be seen as an outright outlier. But the way her dramatic skills combine with her experience, her considerable musical artistry, to outweigh inconsistencies in her voice today suits me - not such a Bellini fan - better.

One strikingly positive consequence of this darkness and plumminess is to offer a stark contrast with Adalgisa. Raffaella Lupinacci is listed as a mezzo-soprano, but you’d hardly guess it: she has by far the brighter timbre. Her voice is young, healthy and strong right up to the top. I’d ranked her among the better of the singers (as Giovanna Seymour and Sara) in La Monnaie's 2023 Donizetti pasticcio, Bastarda; as Adalgisa, she actually had me thinking she might take on the same kind of Rossini roles as Anastasia Bartoli - whether as a soprano or a mezzo, I honestly can’t say. She has that Italianate fire. She matched Enea Scala’s ‘baritenorial’ sound perfectly, and her duets with Sally Matthews were high points of the matinee.

On Sunday afternoon, Scala himself was in particularly punchy but steady vocal form. His performance was characteristically generous: he always seems determined to give the audience their money’s worth, throwing himself into his role with no holding back. Subtlety and elegance aren't his greatest strengths; we all know that. And maybe one day all that carefree abandon will catch up with him: already, his topmost range, fortunately called upon less in Bellini than in Rossini, can sound strained. But Rossinian stratosphere aside, when he’s at his best, you get all the notes - in tune - oodles of commitment, and bags of seductive charm.

Alexander Vinogradov is a robust, resounding Oroveso. (Admittedly, not for the first time, as long-term subscribers, used to the sound reaching us in our seats high up under the dome, we wondered if La Monnaie sometimes uses subtle amplification.) Funnily enough, I first heard him nearly twenty years ago as Truffaldino at the Palais Garnier. By 2022, I was singling him out as one of the absolute stars of Les Huguenots, in Olivier Py’s Brussels staging, for his ‘extraordinary Marcel.’ It must be frustrating for him to have so little, relatively speaking, to sing in Norma.

The chorus was strong and enthusiastic. But above all the orchestra, under George Petrou, deserves a special mention. Someone who’s worked closely with him tells me, simply, ‘He is a genius!!!’ This was Norma played with a sense of history as an almost neoclassical work, and set firmly in its time and place: looking back, as Wagner noted, to Gluck and Spontini, recalling ‘the attitude struck by Greek tragedy,’ and echoing ‘Schiller’s belief (...) that opera carries all our hopes for the return of classical tragedy to the stage.’ (From Wagner’s review of a performance of Norma in Königsberg in 1837, translated by Stewart Spencer in The Wagner Journal, March 2007, Volume 1, Number 1.)

Petrou’s respect for the score is total. Brisk tempi but moderate volumes keep the ‘firemen’s band’ potential of the livelier passages, marches especially, under welcome control. Rich wood and brass timbres coaxed out of the usually smoother modern instruments bring a wealth of colour and variety to orchestral tuttis. The solos are suitably wistful. The strings remain alert during their endless (and to me, exasperating) arpeggios and oom-cha-cha-chas. (I was told this summer by a couple of Berlin wind soloists that string players there are driven out of their wits playing Bellini.) Everything sounds just right: firmly in hand yet with a delicate grip, perfectly judged, balanced and in place, taking full advantage of the qualities the orchestra has developed since Alain Altinoglu took over as music director.

I remarked to the friend mentioned above that, in Bellini, you don’t usually expect the orchestra to steal the show. ‘With George,’ he replied, ‘that isn’t surprising.’ So now I know.

Like Sally Matthews and Enea Scala, Christophe Coppens has quite often worked for La Monnaie, in partnership with an architecture practice for the sets. On his website, he describes himself as a 'multidisciplinary artist, designer and opera director.' Note the word order, because browsing back through my write-ups, I see a pattern emerging. For example, regarding a Bartok double bill in 2018: ‘A series of handsome images, but I wished the director had done more in his designer sets.’ Then Turandot in 2024: ‘This is, indeed, a designer “show”, but not such a well-directed one. The soloists are left, not for the first time of course, more or less to their own devices.’

So it is with Norma. Stripping the plot (though not, for once, Enea Scala), as directors do these days, down to its essentials and seeking contemporary parallels, he sets it in a closed, far-right (even neo-Nazi) community violently opposed to ‘progress’ or Enlightenment values imported by others. Norma, of course, remains torn between the two. Esthetically, he fixes on two key elements. Concrete, representing (to cut quite a long story short) the disappearance of nature; and the car, a symbol of overconsumption and the destruction of the planet, but more than that, so he explains: ‘I see the car in our society – which is failing in many areas – as a kind of no man’s land, a capsule, a non-space, an enlargement of the characters’ emotional world. A car is by no means a romantic place or object, but one in which many things happen, where many emotions surface.’

Funnily enough, I recently messaged to an opera expert my disappointment with Bieito’s recent Die Walküre in Paris, which I saw as falling back on modern directorial clichés, and his reply was: ‘Yawn... too bad. And cars with headlamps?’ Well, here, yes, as they are places where many things happen, we had cars with headlamps galore: wrecked, in flames, swinging over Norma’s head during ‘Casta Diva’, frosted over (the production is constantly ‘cold’ and snow sometimes falls, to customary magical effect), fished, streaming, out of a cistern - lights still working nevertheless. Adalgisa and Pollione make out in one, and for the finale, Norma and Pollione are immolated in one as well - with real fire, though not enough of it.

All this takes place in a grey, multi-purpose concrete box, along with complex use of the stage lifts and openings in the floor (e.g. that cistern). The precision lighting is strikingly sophisticated from the start. For example, a horizontal bar of light picks out the faces of the chorus lined up in the dark on stage, and forms a rectangular ‘frame’ as it runs along the walls behind them. Frequently, intricate patterns are made by stark beams through steel grilles. An assembly of scrunched-up cars, à la César or John Chamberlain, rotates, throwing out dazzling shafts of light, like a chic, designer disco ball. There’s a scene in a diner (Act One, Scene Two: Norma’s dwelling), right across the stage, that becomes, after the interval, a railway carriage, with snowy video landscapes rushing past the windows. The costumes are wholly contemporary and mostly dark; the feral young men of the community, in particular, are in paramilitary black.

Overall, the production is certainly a handsome designer artefact. But once again, the soloists are often left on their own in front of it, making corny opera gestures. Pollione is planted there, feet well apart, in classic ‘park-and-bark’ postures. Adalgisa even, at one point, clasps her fists to her bosom, like the virtuous heroine of a flickering silent film. Oroveso at the end, just clamps his head in his hands, like me discovering the Met’s old Aida. Fortunately, the urgency of their vocal performances, Sally Matthews’ steely determination (stylishly ice-blond blond-haired, in skinny, almost Catwoman black), and Petrou’s phenomenal achievement with the score, make up for the half-baked directing.

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.