[Met Performance] CID:332006



Lucia di Lammermoor
Metropolitan Opera House, Wed, September 29, 1999




Lucia di Lammermoor (525)
Gaetano Donizetti | Salvadore Cammarano
Lucia
Andrea Rost

Edgardo
Frank Lopardo

Enrico
Roberto Frontali

Raimondo
Paul Plishka

Normanno
Ronald Naldi

Alisa
Andrea Trebnik

Arturo
Matthew Polenzani


Conductor
Charles Mackerras


Production
Nicolas Jo?l

Set Designer
Ezio Frigerio

Costume Designer
Franca Squarciapino

Lighting Designer
Vinicio Cheli

Stage Director
Paul Mills





Lucia di Lammermoor received ten performances this season.
Original 1835 version used.

Review 1:

Paul Griffiths in The New York Times
A ?Lucia? Shorn of Accrued Acrobatics

Wednesday's performance of "Lucia di Lammermoor" at the Metropolitan Opera was the 525th the company has presented, but the first to follow Donizetti's score. Display items accruing from long after the composer's death, including sustained top notes at the ends of numbers and the cadenza with flute in the mad scene, were scrupulously expunged, and the mad scene was also restored to its putative original form by the provision of a glass harmonica, an instrument producing spooky tones from rubbed glass containers, though Donizetti may have replaced this by a flute even before the first performance.

The Met had it both ways, by having a flute shadow and virtually overpower the glass harmonica, which was a shame. The vocal alterations were more telling. No doubt sopranos, and audiences, will need some convincing that Lucia can run mad without warbling away in duet with her flute, but here Andrea Rost bravely showed that the scene can be just as effective, vocally thrilling and more consistent with the rest of the opera when done in pure 1830's style.

Ms. Rost suits the role with her slight figure, her edgy movements and her light, silvery voice, skillfully projected. In the earlier parts of the opera there had been worrisome problems ? a wide vibrato and a scooping up through wide intervals ? but in the mad scene these miraculously fell away, and her singing became neatly controlled and agile. She convinced one that the scene can work brilliantly without its acrobatic vocal exercises, Donizetti's original trilling delirium being more expressive and, as she sang it, more graceful.

As Edgardo, Frank Lopardo paralleled her performance closely, for he, too, became finer as the evening wore on and made his last scene a justification of the subtler but still hugely demanding vocal manners of early Romantic opera. His fermatas at the end of the first part of the aria were astonishing, but so, too, were his phrases in precise, almost Mozartian articulation, his dreamy mezza voce lines and his sense of the music's pulse and pace, a sense that made hint seem totally and immediately in control, not just singing a part.

Roberto Frontali, the Enrico, sang strongly, but with little differentiation of color or dynamic nuance. Paul Plishka reappeared as Raimondo. Andrea Trebnik and Matthew Polenzani achieved the rare Schoenberg- Donizetti double, having sung In "Moses and Aron" the night before, and both were excellent to hear again.

The production, a little altered from last season, is still a joke, and probably a performance in period style needs a staging all its own. Charles Mackerras, the conductor and restorer of the score, led a colorful, musical and at times alacritous performance.



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