With what must seem reckless disregard for her safety, the High Priestess Norma chooses to conduct her reprehensible private life in dangerous proximity to her public one. In Grange Park Opera’s excellent new production of Bellini’s best-known work, the Druid spiritual leader – superbly portrayed by Claire Rutter – is not holed up in a hideaway remote from her sacred grove but in a building right beside it.

After a busy day of sermons and sacrifices, she passes through a door next to the altar into her domestic quarters. (The arrangement permits of a neat revolving set from designer Robert Innes Hopkins.) There await a sofa on which to collapse, a comfy ‘cardy’ (it’s a modern-dress production) to slip into – and her two young sons. These are offspring whose existence is known to none save herself, her confidante Clothilde (Sally Johnson) and the man who fathered them, That anyone should have had their way with the priestess is bad enough; that her lover should be one of Gaul’s hated Roman occupants, the pro-consul Pollione (John Hudson), is all but unthinkable. Courting disaster by having her boys so close to hand seems — well, lunatic. But that’s what comes of all that looking at, and singing about, the moon . . .

And so to Casta Diva, the opera’s most famous aria, or rather cavatina, to which Ms Rutter brings astonishing vocal power. She chooses, as Joan Sutherland did, to sing it in the key of G rather than the lower, and therefore slightly easier, F insisted on by the first Norma, Giuditta Pasta, and also favoured by the role’s most famous exponent, Maria Callas.

Such is Callas’s identification with the opera, incidentally, that GPO devotes a four-page essay to her in the programme. It was instructive, too, studying the audience around me, to observe that a great many pink pounds had clearly been spent by men eager to savour a work indelibly associated with a woman widely considered the number one gay icon.

Their reward was a performance of true star quality that looks likely to propel South Shields-born Ms Rutter to international fame. Almost as impressive was that of soprano Sara Fulgoni, a favourite with WNO audiences, in the role of Norma’s young rival in love, Adalgisa. Directed by Martin Constantine and under conductor Stephen Barlow, this was truly a night to remember.

There are performances of Norma on June 13, 18, 24 and 27, and July 1, 3 and 6. Tickets: 01962 737366 (www.grangeparkopera.co.uk).