After offer­ing clues taken from ‘webisodes’ filmed dur­ing the record­ing of Cecilia Bartoli’s cd Mis­sion, which even­tu­ally led to the name of the com­poser fea­tured on the disc, Decca are being cun­ning again by offer­ing ‘exclus­ive con­tent’ to stir up interest in La Ceci’s latest project.

Fol­low­ing this link, it is pos­sible to play a little game to recon­struct the cover of Norma, fig­ur­ing Bar­toli as she will pre­sum­ably be styled for the Salzburg pro­duc­tion on 17 May; an Anna Mag­nani type, as she appeared in Franco Zeffirelli’s legendary pro­duc­tion of Gio­vanni Verga’s La Lupa in Florence in 1965.

Anna Mag­nani (with Gian­carlo Gian­nini) in Gio­vanni Verga’s “La Lupa”

If you’d rather not play the game, after 5 minutes it lets you see the video prize any­way: a peek back­stage dur­ing the record­ing of the opera, with Gio­vanni Ant­onini con­duct­ing (as he did on the Sac­ri­fi­cium and Viv­aldi discs). It’s just a 1½ minute promo, but it gets the mouth water­ing any­way. Those of us who caught the con­cert per­form­ances in Dortmund in June 2011 know that this appet­izer will be more than equalled by the main course.

And for those in a hurry who don’t want to wait 5 minutes, you can see the clip dir­ectly on You­Tube!

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