[Met Performance] CID:310600

New Production

Lucia di Lammermoor
Metropolitan Opera House, Thu, November 19, 1992

Debut : Francesca Zambello, Martin Pakledinaz, Pat Collins




Lucia di Lammermoor (475)
Gaetano Donizetti | Salvadore Cammarano
Lucia
June Anderson

Edgardo
Richard Leech

Enrico
Juan Pons

Raimondo
Paul Plishka

Normanno
John Horton Murray

Alisa
Judith Christin

Arturo
Paul Groves


Conductor
Marcello Panni


Production
Francesca Zambello [Debut]

Set Designer
John Conklin

Costume Designer
Martin Pakledinaz [Debut]

Lighting Designer
Pat Collins [Debut]

Choreographer
Carmen De Lavallade





Lucia di Lammermoor received eighteen performances this season.

FUNDING:
Production a gift of Cynthia Wood

Review 1:

Tim Page in Newsday
Sound and Fury, Signifying Very Little

Although she was lustily booed during her curtain call Thursday night, Francesca Zambello deserves credit for courage. The director, in her Metropolitan Opera debut, attempted to transform Donizetti's showcase for a loopy, trilling soprano ? that interminable waxwork, "Lucia di Lammermoor" ? into genuine music theater. She failed (and, to this taste), failed by rather a wide margin) but her efforts were commendable, even noble in their way.

However, to put it plainly, and with all due gratitude for "L'Elisir d'Amore," "Don Pasquale" and several other Donizetti operas, "Lucia" just doesn't work. The ?Sextet? is rightly famous ? a magnificent set piece, no doubt about it ? and I suppose the "Mad Scene," with the proper singer, is all right of its sort. But most of the score is as bleak and uneventful as the Scottish terrain where the story is set, and the characters are cutouts, one and all.

Enter Zambello. "As we began to visualize the misty psychological landscape for our 'Lucia,' we turned for inspiration to the brooding, disturbed mindscapes of Edgar Allan Poe, the foreboding, hallucinatory watercolors of Victor Hugo and the melancholy vistas of such German Romantic painters as Caspar David Friedrich ? all contemporaries of Donizetti," the director writes. "We sought to represent visually the increasing deterioration of Lucia's mind, as her brother Enrico brings chaos and destruction to her world."

The resulting production (imagine a cavernous expressionist rendering ? all blacks, blues, pale moons and blood-reds ? of a cathedral cemetery, immediately after an 8.5 on the Richter scale) is sometimes visually arresting. Still, the charms of this modest opera seemed impossibly over-freighted, as if Ingmar Bergman had created a deeply felt, intricately nuanced, profoundly meaningful episode of "Leave It to Beaver." It's just not indicated: My own suspicion is that "Lucia" might make its strongest effect as a frank "period piece," staged in a deliberately formal, stylized and cheerfully antiquated fashion, accepting the fact that you can take the kilts off Edgardo, you can order Lucia to do all sorts of funny stuff with a sword, but you can't breathe life into Madame Tussauds.

June Anderson, the evening's Lucia, has a full, healthy, agile and not very interesting voice. Disregarding a few shrill high notes and the occasional imprecise pitch, she negotiated Lucia's vocal hurdles with the impersonal proficiency of an Olympic champion, canary division. Richard Leech, as Edgardo, sounded strained much of the evening, and the role is not a grateful one. Juan Pons was both idiomatic and malevolent as Enrico, while Paul Plishka brought a paternal gruffness to the role of Raimondo.

There was middling support from John Horton Murray, Judith Christin and Paul Groves. Marcello Panni led the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a lively, stylish but not well disciplined performance (except the ?Sextet,? which puttered along in a crisp, neatly delineated way, making its full dramatic effect without italicization). The chorus, by the way, was ensconced offstage throughout the night ? the better to "weird you out," my dear!



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