Indiana University to Videocast Four Lucias

On Friday and Saturday evenings (8:00PM EST and 0100GMT) Indiana University will be airing a live videocast of its production of Lucia di Lammermoor. There will be two different performances broadcast on consecutive nights, each with a different cast.

And then, they will do it all over again next weekend - videocasting the final two performances.

So, altogether we will have four opportunities to see this production. Once the run is over, the University has told us that they will pick the best performance by each cast and make those two performances available as videos on demand.

Kudos to Indiana University's video team for making all four performances available.

YOU SAY NETREBKO, I SAY NEBTREBKO...

Sam Shirakawa is back with his first squib of the new year....

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR | Metropolitan Opera | Monday, January 26, 2009

So were they fabulous?

In a word: No.

That was the gist of my brief chat with an acquaintance shortly after Monday night's Met Lucia. (By now, you must know who "they" are.)

Despite an economy that appears to be collapsing by the minute, the crisis failed to prevent a sold-out audience from attending Anna Netrebko's first Met Lucia. The crowd was presumably also there for her frequent stage partner Rolando Villazon, performing Edgardo, also for the first time at the Met.

For all the hubba-hubba swirling around the opera world's current super-primadonna, who once spelled her surname Nebtrebko, it was Rolando -- he always spelled it Rolando -- who unintentionally elicited the breath-taking moments during a messy performance. He showed signs of vocal difficulties in the first act, but by the middle of the middle act, the symptoms were acute. In the middle of the finale ensemble, he "just stopped," as one Met regular rightly put it during the 40-minute intermission that followed. Indeed, that breath-stopping pause was long enough to make you gag.

At the start of the third act, the Met's GM Peter Gelb stepped on stage to ask the audience for indulgence. Rolando muddled through without further incident, and he received a big hand at the curtain calls, but it remains clear that he has yet to surmount the highly publicized problems that recently caused him to take an extended sabbatical.

Anna, meanwhile, was not invulnerable to the "fraught" conditions visited upon this performance. The coloratura passages were clean, but the high notes were, with one exception, off-target. All in all, her first Lucia was less a descent into madness than a middling effort to transcend an ailing tenor and some scrappy orchestral playing led by Marco Armiliato.

Separating themselves admirably from the downward slide, though, were the orchestral soloists: Harpist Mariko Anraku, flutist Stefan Ragnar Höskuldsson, and armonica soloist Cecilia Brauer.

By the way, Ildar Abdrazakov as Raimondo sang flawlessly. But who noticed?

And by-the-by, too, the aforementioned 40-minute intermission is required at every Lucia performance -- as the program now notes in boldface type -- by the complexities of mounting the last act sets in Mary Zimmerman's production. The centerpiece is an enormous flying staircase. But it serves merely a series of utilitarian rather than dramatic purposes -- to provide a means of access to a room in the Wolf Crag's Castle, to enable Lucia to ascend to the bridal chamber with her ill-fated husband, to allow her to descend deranged therefrom without him, and to permit the Ravenswood lackeys to carry her lifeless body back upstairs again after she drops dead from a high note.

Is it worth the interminable wait?

In a word: no.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

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