This is not simply a recording of Norma as staged in January 2018 at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa. Its real value is that it is the superb conclusion to the career of Mariella Devia, one of the finest Belcanto singers of our time, which makes the present recording an ideal artistic testament that pinpoints Mariella Devia's total eminence at the end of a long, hard-won career. That career began officially 45 years earlier as Lucia di Lammermoor at the Toti Dal Monte Competition in Treviso in 1973- a role in which Devia would become the standard by which others would by judged. At the beginning of her career, Devia had to emigrate to the USA. Thrown in at the deep end, Mariella Devia’s professionalism proved that this emerging young Italian was a force to be reckoned with. She got her Italian break in 1984 with Rossini’s Adelaide di Borgogna. Mariella Devia took the step toward Norma in 2013 in Bologna. She proved not only that she could carry the role from start to finish with no hint of loss in consistency but that her class was intact throughout. Her one-of-a-kind Norma achieved impact mainly through her singing, and her approach to expression prized the intimate and the subtly incisive over all-out hyperbole. Over the next five years, she consolidated the role even as she cut back on public appearances, performing it more than any other part. The results heard on the present recording speak for themselves.

Like Alexander Borodin: doctor and chemist; Robert Schumann: expert on law; Arthur Schnitzler: doctor; Charles Ives: insurance broker; Giuseppe Sinopoli: doctor, Alfred Huber has divided his career between two professions and it was while a medical student in 1983 that he decided learn to compose and make it his life’s work. He thus attended music college in Vienna and Linz and completed his education at Feldkirch. Initially, Huber felt close ties to the music of the avant garde, but even when first and Feldkirch, he began to wonder about musical perception and under Herbert Willi, made his first professional appearances in concert and radio broadcasts. Huber’s music has subsequently evolved beyond the confines of the avant garde and been influenced, perhaps inevitably, by his profession as a neurosurgeon with a knowledge of the physical layout of the brain and by the neurosciences which go hand in hand with that profession and are of great use in understanding how music is perceived.