Lend an ear ph 7 • "NNICOTT Cecilia Bartoli takes a sophisticated route to simplicity in La Sonnambula - but maybe that's what the opera cries out for

In the beginning was Norma, and God saw Norma and it was good. Perhaps not. In the beginning was Adelson and Savina, Bellini's first opera, and there would be six more before he got to Norma in 1831. But Norma so towers above the others, if not always in quality certainly in the affection of audiences, that there are many opera lovers who never seem to go beyond it. The strange concentration of the opera lover, who can make do not just with one quintessential work from

So it's a delight to greet the arrival of a new La Sonnambula with a starry cast, an interesting gimmick — the title-role is sung by a mezzosoprano — and a claim to be the first on period instruments. This will undoubtedly be known as Cecilia Bartoli's Sonnambula, but there is an almost as interesting performance from tenor Juan Diego FlOrez, and worthy contributions from lesser names, including a finely etched Rodolfo from

Ildebrando D'Arcangelo.

Sonnambula dates from the same year as Norma, the former opening in the spring, the latter in December, a manic pace of production from a composer who didn't necessarily do his best work under duress. If the story were better, Sonnambula might be recognised as the better opera, more certain in tone, more consistently elevated in its artistic achievement.

But who hasn't sneered just a little at the premise — good girl sleepwalks her way into a count's bedroom, and thereby sullies her reputation — a flimsy plot device to launch a twohour drama? The little Swiss village of the opera's setting, with its tractable and ignorant peasants, feels a little bit like the village of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, premiered a year later. But Donizetti's opera was more overtly comic than Bellini's opera semiseria. Both villages cough up the usual ninnies, and poor befuddled Elvino really seems like a moderately sober version of Nemorino.

I don't really know what to make of Bartoli's performance here, though it is interesting enough to send me back to earlier recordings by other Aminas, if only to get my head around how deliciously bizarre this all is. And in so doing, I've learnt to forgive Bellini's opera its ridiculous

Granted, there are times when Bartoli takes notes so low she produces that demon child sound and you starting looking around for the little girl from The Exorcist. But mostly the role sits very comfortably and what she lacks in brilliance at the top she makes up for with a richness in the rest of the voice. But this is a remarkably fussy reading. Go back to Callas and you hear a singer clarifying, thinning the tone, finding a sound and a style that suggests innocence through simplicity. Bartoli is never one do things simply. Some of her best work sounds as if it's been worked up by a team of experts, tested, tweaked, refined, branded and then rolled out for the public. When she gives the impression of simplicity, as she does in almost every one of Bellini's magnicently wide-arched bel canto lines, it is a calculated simplicity. She can wilt, she can flutter in the spring breeze, she can even turn purple, but she can never really be a wilting violet.

There are two routes to the simple, and Bartoli defines the more modern, complicated one, the carefully crafted illusion of artlessness. You can sympathise with a singer who choses that route, for the other means of getting to the same place — genuine simplicity and directness — is fraught with its own dangers. Consider Anna Netrebko's thoroughly lovely but rather dull account of Act 2 arias from Sonnambula. She reaches for what Callas grasps, but the result is singing that seems bland rather than naive. None of this is to suggest that Bartoli isn't often mesmerising, but it's an exhausting traversal. She simply finds more data in every phrase than other singers.

There may be a hidden canniness in taking this approach. Bellini's opera is also extraordinarily calculated in its suggestion of simple emotions. It is thoroughly sentimentalised, a utopian no-place that casts its spell by eliminating all traces of the real world. The figure of the sleepwalker, which is so easy to condescend to, is in fact a perfect distillation of the work's aesthetic: a dream walk that takes real guilt off the table, making the opera essentially a drama about nothing, and thus as pure a vehicle for music as any libretto ever crafted. That's a complicated way of getting basic human emotions — love, jealousy, grief, joy — on the table and so Bartoli's complicated account may be just what's called for. 0