Instead, director Simon Stone has transplanted her to the Rust Belt whose once-prosperous residents are suffering the effects of economic decline and where the pharmacy and pawnshop are among the only thriving businesses.
In so many productions, the tomb scene that ends the opera seems hopelessly anticlimactic after Lucia’s unraveling, but in this performance Donizetti’s structure finally made sense.In its latest production, the Metropolitan Opera moves the ill-omened heroine in Sir Walter Scott's novel "The Bride of Lammermoor," and Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti opera "Lucia di Lammermoor," which was inspired by the novel, from the Scottish hills to a contemporary American town. Even Arturo, the arranged husband Lucia murders, was charming as sung by the young tenor Matthew Plenk.Īnd Joseph Calleja was sensationally ardent as Lucia’s lover, Edgardo, one of the best roles of his young, exciting Met career. Kwangchul Youn had burnished tone and great dignity as the well-meaning chaplain Raimondo. The manipulative brother Enrico, sung richly and acted with laconic ruefulness by Ludovic Tézier, seems almost reasonable in his heartless demands. With a thoroughly vacant Lucia, the opera is imbalanced: the men, perversely, are the sympathetic ones here, down to the crisp conducting of Patrick Summers. By the time she delivers a fine, tensely eerie mad scene, the stakes of the drama that queasy, distinctively operatic blend of empathy for and exhilaration over the heroine’s degradation are almost entirely forfeit. Her little fidgets, eye motions and twitches around the mouth register in the high definition of extreme movie theater close-ups, but they disappear in the opera house, along with our interest.
With an eye, perhaps, to its growing live simulcast audiences, the Met’s recent productions can seem directed at the camera rather than the audience in the theater.
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