If someone had told me eight years ago that one day I’d be awarding four stars to Katie Mitchell’s chaotic failure of a Lucia di Lammermoor, I’d have thought they were madder than Donizetti’s heroine. However, since that dire first night two things have happened.
First, ahead of its previous revival The Royal Opera did what managements are reluctant to do: they instigated wholesale changes. Gone was the piss-provoking trickle from an infuriating fountain; out went a ludicrous death scene in which the victim’s limitless blood supply had the audience gagging not in revulsion but giggles; and, although the intractable awkwardness of Mitchell’s split-stage storytelling remained, in came a few scenic modifications to improve the audience’s sightlines.
Second, rarely in opera has a mediocre staging been elevated so gloriously by the music. The 2024 vintage is the most fabulously sung evening in this operagoer’s recent memory. I cannot recall the last time I was so moved by voices that transcended mere ‘good’ to ping the ’overwhelming’ bell. Were it not a dirty word in Arts Council circles this revival might even qualify as excellent.
There’s a first-rate crop of male singers. The good guy is great, the bad guy likewise, and even the hapless Arturo (Uruguayan tenor Andrés Presno) makes his mark before succumbing to his now-nearly-bloodless despatch. Designer Vicki Mortimer makes little distinction between the men, all of them clad in dark suits and breeches, so it helps that the Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga as our heroine’s beloved Edgardo and Polish baritone Artur Ruciński as Lucia’s money-grubbing brother Enrico create such well delineated characters. In both cases their singing is bel canto in the truest sense of the term.
Thence to Nadine Sierra, the diva du jour whose international reputation has been soaring of late. She is a sensational Lucia. With her agile, electrifying and freshly coloured timbre, she makes light of Donizetti’s torrent of notes by colouring every one of them in order to paint her character. Consequently, as well as sounding divine with immaculately centred singing across and above the stave, every word the American soprano utters is pregnant with meaning and subtext. On opening night her mad scene was a tour de force – and so was her every appearance elsewhere.
None of these wonders would be possible without a secure hand on the tiller, and conductor Giacomo Sagripanti delivered a perfectly judged account that both honoured the music’s idiom and provided strong support to the chorus and orchestra, not to mention every solo singer.
One’s heart goes out to a revival director when she or he is lumbered with a dog’s dinner, but Robin Tebbutt is director Katie Mitchell’s regular adjutant so he knows the way the wind blows. He has done a fine job here and his role in attenuating the production’s shortcomings cannot be overstated. As for the concept, which brings the action forward by two centuries so that repressive Victorian values can be resurrected then excoriated, enough has been written previously. It is poor stuff from a gifted but erratic director who in the same year (2016) directed a revelatory Pelléas et Mélisande at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. That too is being revived this year, and deservedly so. Lucia di Lammermoor, not so much.
