LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR OR What I Did for Love...

Our old friend Sam Shirakawa gives his view of the Met's Lucia (keep them coming, Sam!):

Metropolitan Opera -- 3 October

If love can make you loony, there was plenty of lunacy to be found during the first fortnight of the Metropolitan's 125th season. On Friday 3 October Lucia di Lammermoor returned to the boards. It's the opera (1835), some critics claim, that restored the themes of transcendent love and death to lyric theater of the 19th century.

Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano stick fairly closely to the story Sir Walter Scott tells in The Bride of Lammermoor, but they amend some salient details. In the opera, for instance, Lucia is said to be extremely distraught over her mother's death. In Scott's novel (1819), Lucia's shrewish mother is very much alive and takes the lead in forcing her daughter to renounce her paramour and enter into an expedient marriage. In another deviation from the source, Donizetti's Lucia fatally stabs her bridegroom on their wedding night, while Scott's Lucy wounds Arthur Bucklaw seriously, but not fatally. The victim, pursuantly goes to some length in forbidding evermore the mere mention of the incident in his presence.

Why such emphatic entreaties for discretion?

Some surmise, perhaps correctly, that hapless Lucy, having become irreparably separated from her senses, attempts to separate her groom from his private parts. [How many sane women throughout the ages have done that?] In simply eliminating Bucklaw entirely, Donizetti and Cammarano saved countless impresarios from having to hire a castrato/counter-tenor for just one expository scene.

The Arturo, by the way, was the big surprise at the premiere. Sean Panikkar made a meal out of the bit-part and displayed a clarion lyric tenor that was nothing less than large. Blessed with musicality as resplendent as his voice, he brought his all-too-brief appearance into bold relief against some hefty competition from the lead singers.

Those who know, knew that Diana Damrau's Lucia would be good, but few could have guessed how much so. It took a moment or two for her to find her focus, but by the time she got around to the second verse of "Regnava nel silenzio" Damrau was well on her way to surpassing her immediate predecessor at the Met in the part -- vocally at least -- in this hold-over of last season's hotly hyped new production. Damrau traversed the fiortituri up and down the scale with the ease of a gold-medal skateboarder, and her top notes were uniformly bang-on. [Yes, all the high Cs and Ds have been restored, thank you very much.]

Dramatically, she still needs to decide what kind of heroine she wants to embody, but she appears to be working on it. The challenge lies in her genes: a German coloratura and then some, but she's on Italian turf. Berger was perhaps the most recent of that pedigree to assimilate this rep comfortably. And that was eons ago. If Damrau can succeed in making her Lucia sound easy and inevitable, she stands a chance of fading fond memories of Jaws, who owned the role from 1959 until her retirement.

Piotr Beczala as Edgardo was no real surprise either. Watch his stuff on YouTube. Do it in chronological order, and you'll see how rapidly he's developing into a contender. But enjoy him while you may: imbecilic agents and moronic managements have a way of wasting up-and-comers like Beczala or just ignoring them.

Vladimir Stoyanov made a likable debut as Lucia's dislikable brother Enrico. There is no doubt that a fine baritone, faintly reminiscent of Bastianini, has come among us. Fine as the basic equipment may be, it remains to be heard how refined an artist this Bulgarian can become.

The payroll was respectably rounded out by Ildar Abdrazakov, Ronald Naldi and Michaela Martens as Raimondo, Normanno and Alisa respectively.

Mary Zimmerman's production is arguably the most interesting Lucia seen at the Met in decades, but problems with Daniel Ostling's Adobe-driven sets continue to generate interminable intermissions. Adding a dubious lagniappe at the season premiere, the huge flying staircase refused to recede into the wings at the conclusion of Damrau's riveting Mad Scene. That left the poor lackeys carrying Lucia to the balcony holding the bag, so to speak, for what seemed an eternity. And that left the audience madly clapping and clapping and... Really, now, must any production of Lucia in this day and age of nifty hi-tech scene changes shlep on for nearly three hours and forty minutes?

Proceedings in the pit went much more fluidly. The orchestra under Marco Armilato performed miracles with a score that all too often falls prey to oom-pah-pah listlessness; sensational solo playing by harpist Mariko Anraku, flutist Stefan Ragnar Höskuldsson and Celia Breuer on glass armonico. Only Anraku, however, got to go home before the epic-length second intermission.

Sam H. Shirakawa

Live offerings - Saturday, August 30, 2008

Late summer on the opera scene offers several live offerings on interest, including an historic 1976 Puritani from the Met with Sutherland, Pavarotti and Milnes, all at or near the peak of their powers; Paolo Gavanelli in Verdi's Nabucco; from Glimmerglass Opera, another chance to hear Britten's Death in Venice; and a concert featuring vocal works by Messiaen, Liszt and Mendelssohn, with Ruth Ziesak.

Just underway as I post this:

• Espace Musique - From the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, Italy, Rossini's Maometto II, with Francesco Meli, Marina Rebeka, Daniela Barcellona, Enrico Iviglia, Michelle Pertusi and Cosimo Panozzo, conducted by Sylvia L'Écuyer.

And starting shortly:

• CBC Two - From Vienna State Opera, a rebroadcast of Mozart's Così fan tutte, with Barbara Frittoli, Angelika Kirchschlager, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, Francesco Meli, Laura Tatulescu, Natale de Carolis, conducted by Riccardo Muti.


• KUHF & XLNC1 - Another chance to hear Olga Borodina star in Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalilah from San Francisco Opera; her colleagues are Clifton Forbis, Juha Uusitalo (High Priest of Dagon), Oren Gradus (Old Hebrew), Eric Jordan (Abimélech), Noah Stewart (Philistines' messenger), Richard Walker (First Philistine) and Jere Torkelsen (Second Philistine), with Patrick Summers conducting.


• RTP Antena 2 - From Ópera Estatal da Baviera, today's leading Verdi baritone, Paolo Gavanelli, stars in Verdi's Nabucco, with Maria Guleghina, Daniela Sindram, Lana Kos, Alexander Antonenko, Kevin Conners, Giacomo Prestia and Andreas Kohn, conducted by Paolo Carignani.


• WFMT Opera Series (on numerous stations) - From San Francisco Opera, Wagner's Tannhäuser, with Peter Seiffert, Petra Maria Schnitzer, Petra Lang, James Rutherford, Eric Halfvarson, Stefan Margita ,Gregory Reinhart, Ricardo Lugo, Matthew O'Neill and Ji Young Yang, conducted by Donald Runnicles.


• NPR World of Opera - From Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York, Britten's Death in Venice, with William Burden, David Pittsinger, Bruce Reed, Craig Phillips, John Gaston and Nicola Bowie, conducted by Stewart Robinson.


• Radio Clasica de Espana - A live broadcast from Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, of Tchaikovsky's Eugen Onegin, with F. Maria Capitanucci, S. Vassileva, D. Korchak, A. Abdrazakov, T. Tramonti, M. Pardo, A. Vespasiano and M. Bolognesi, conducted by J. Mena.


• Radio Oesterreich International - A September 22, 2007 performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens, from the Grand Théatre in Geneva, with Anna Caterina Antonacci, Kurt Streit, Anne Sofie von Otter, Isabell Cals, Marie-Claude Chappius and Jean-François Lapointe, conducted by John Nelson.


• France Musique, MDR Figaro & RBB KulturRadio - From the Frauenkirche in Dresden, a concert featuring among other works, two by Messiaen: O sacrum convivium with Ruth Ziesak, Mojca Erdmann, Christian Elsner, Alexander Marco-Buhrmester; and Apparition de l'église éternelle, with Johannes Unger playing the organ; Liszt 's San Francesco, Preludio per II cantico del Sol di San Francesco, with Johannes Unger playing the organ; Mendelssohn's Symphonie-cantate n°2 en si bémol Majeur op.52 "Lobgesang", with Ruth Ziesak, Mojca Erdmann, Christian Elsner, and Alexander Marco-Buhrmester, all works conducted by Jun Märkl.


• Latvia Radio Klasika - From the Metropolitan Opera in New York, an historic broadcast of Bellini's I Puritani, from March 13, 1976, with Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti and Sherrill Milnes, conducted by Richard Bonynge.


• WDAV - A rebroadcast from NPR World of Opera of Donizetti's Lucie de Lammermoor (French version) from Glimmerglass Opera, with Sarah Coburn, Chad A. Johnson, Earle Patriarco, Raúl Hernández, Craig Phillips and Bryon Grohman, conducted by Beatrice Jona Afron.

Happy listening....