One of my most treasured opera experiences is attending a dress rehearsal of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love in a small theatre in Parma a quarter of a century ago. I’d never heard Donizetti live before. I nearly died of delight. I’ve loved his music ever since.

The new ENO Lucia di Lammermoor — an opera I always think of as Brigadoon with mad scenes — has been given a marvellously sinister makeover by director David Alden, translator Amanda Holden and conductor Paul Daniel. The piece really does sound like a work of musical genius, and it looks like a Victorian horror story, with an infantilised heroine and an incestuous brother.

The first night foyer was buzzing with buffs and bores exchanging notes on Joan Sutherland and June Anderson (I admire the first on disc  and adored the second at Covent Garden), and then an ENO apparatchik pre-empted the overture and craved our indulgence for Anna Christy’s bronchial condition.

It mattered not a jot. The American diva has a small voice — well, she only four feet tall, genuinely petite – but she sang beautifully and thrillingly without any undue ostentation. Mysteriously, half way through the first act, a vey tall chap in a modern grey suit suddenly appeared from the wings to sing Raimondo the chaplain while Clive Bayley carried on mouthing.

Was this a deeply considered alienation effect in Alden’s production? Alas, no. The apparatchik reappeared to confirm that Bayley had indeed lost his voice but would continue to act while Paul Whelan (slated to sing the role anyway for two performances in March) carried on singing. He did so with a fine rich bass burr, even if he looked a bit silly, though not as silly as the apparatchik.

An even dafter piece of substitution disfigured the last scene where Edgardo, Lucia’s lover, again beautifully sung by the equally tiny, dry-as-a-bone tenor Barry Banks, looking like an elvin refugee from Lord of the Rings, shot himself in the stomach, cueing pistol fire from the wings and a spurious cloud of smoke drifting over the stage.

Edgardo is supposed to stab himself, anyway, which would have saved a lot of unnecessary trouble. Still, the show wound up to a tremendous climax and we all went home elated with such dire and dreadful misery.

Charles Edwards the designer, whose last theatre piece was the drab cell for Ariel Dorfman’s ghastly Purgatorio at the Arcola, has created a chilling ancestral pile with a theatre-within-a-theatre in the vasty hall where cruel passion is spent and murder committed.

The actors sometimes totter around childishly on their knees and Lucia has to sing some of her most complicated stuff lying upside down on her hated wedding bed, or contorted like an abused rag doll.  I don’t know how singers cope with these directorial demands — do they get paid danger money? —  but Anna Christy was jolly sporting about her indignities and just carried on singing better than ever.

The reception was wildly enthusiastic. But then it was for Sally Potter’s terrific Carmen, too, and the music critics hated that. I think they quite like this, though. I also think it’s a great production.

But I still yearn guiltily for a bit of Brigadoon. The chorus is supposed to arrive at the Scottish pile from the hunt, but they all turn up in bowler hats and start riffling through papers. There is an explanation for this, but I’ve forgotten what it was. 
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.