Vincenzo Bellini
Powerful and beautiful Norma at the Met, expertly led by Maurizio Benini, with Sonya Yoncheva in the impossibly ambitious title role. I’d missed this David McVicar production when it premiered some years ago, but it was worth the wait: the atmosphere of elegance and nobility perfectly matches, for me, those vital aspects of Bellini’s magical score. And of course—of course!—what ethereal beauty in the music.
P.S. The glorious, bewitching Casta diva… was written, it turns out, in G major. The incomparable Joan Sutherland is one of the very few who (sometimes) dared sing it in that key: