[Met Tour] CID:150630



Lucia di Lammermoor
Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, California, Thu, April 28, 1949




Lucia di Lammermoor (245)
Gaetano Donizetti | Salvadore Cammarano
Lucia
Patrice Munsel

Edgardo
Richard Tucker

Enrico
Robert Merrill

Raimondo
Nicola Moscona

Normanno
Paul Franke

Alisa
Thelma Votipka

Arturo
Thomas Hayward


Conductor
Pietro Cimara







Review 1:

Unsigned review in the Los Angeles News

Opera Review: “Lucia di Lammermoor”

 

Lucy of Lammermoor lost her lover, her sanity and her life in the brief space of 30 minutes last night, while a large Shrine audience, powerless to stem the tide of calamities, cheerfully applauded their progress instead.

 

Donizetti’s melodious opera, third in the current series of Metropolitan productions, brought two new personalities to the well-worn roles of Lucia and her star-crossed lover.

 

Patrice Munsel, a dark-haired and charming Lucy, sang brilliantly in the tragic role of the Highland lass who went mad on her wedding night, while Richard Tucker was a vocally compelling Edgar. Pietro Cimara again conducted.

 

This season the Metropolitan has sent us few of the established box-office draws of past years. Such figures as Lily Pons, Ezio Pinza and many others are not among this season’s artists to make the long trek here. The result has been some disappointment to local opera lovers, even though the younger singers offered in familiar roles performed creditably enough.

 

Young singers must be heard sometime if we expect to have vocal idols of the future as we have had them in the past, and there has perhaps been too little attention given them by a public too busy worshiping opeardom’s aging stars to observe that their gifts are fading.

 

Last night’s opera, without any top drawer names, was better sung on the whole than many performances that furnish a single star with mediocre support. Robert Merrill, for instance, a singer not visibly featured in earlier productions here, proved to have a very fine voice and an assured presence that made his characterization of Lord Henry Ashton much stronger than this thankless role customarily becomes.

 

In the last scene, which belongs wholly to the tenor, he offered one of the finest examples of fluent bel canto heard here in some time.

 

As Edgar, Tucker sang beautifully in a fine-grained, resonant tenor that is mighty agreeable, and he acted the role throughout with poise and fine dramatic sense.

 

Miss Munsel’s voice is fluent and has adequate carrying power, although it has a slight harshness through much of its register and some of her tones are peculiarly tortured. Aside from this her singing is extremely nice; she has plenty of volume to work with and an assured, fluent coloratura that is capable of some rather thrilling vocalization, as she proved in a spine-tingling “mad scene.”

 

In this she was not content to copy any predecessor but created her own portrayal which was in its way as dramatically fine as any that has been seen here. She took a dozen curtain calls.

 

Nicola Moscona sang a commanding, vocally impressive Raimondo, and Thelma Votipka was Lucy’s maid. Cimara’s direction again held all the operatic elements in adequate balance and the orchestra sounded very good.

 

The Metropolitan’s beautifully trained chorus gets plenty of chance to be heard in this opera and contributed notably to the scene of Lammermoor Hall.



Search by season: 1948-49

Search by title: Lucia di Lammermoor,



Met careers