All of you who said, “Oh, Kiri te Kanawa could never do Norma” are feeling pretty silly right now, aren’t you? Of course, La Cieca doesn’t mean the Bellini druidess, a role the Kiwi songbird never could have mastered even at the peak of her career, whenever that might have been.

No, this Norma is the creepy aging diva who refuses to go away:  “I promise you I’ll never desert you again, because after Der Rosenkavalier we’ll make another opera, and another and another. You see, this is my life.  It always will be.  There’s nothing else – just me and the prompters and those wonderful people out there in the dark…” [NYT]