Read what our audiences thought of Lucia di Lammermoor
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Review from Peter
I was in absolute raptures for the first two acts of this, which were extraordinary. All the singers had tremendous power and really filled the great barn of the Colisseum. Even minor characters (eg the priest) sung clearly and strongly. Anna Christy, who sang Lucia, was also wonderfully fluid and dexterous singing the coloratura, and conveyed the trapped, desperate nature of Lucia, and also her slightly unbalanced nature, right from the very start. Production wise there were some brilliant touches - such as the way the characters all seemed to sidle around the edge of the huge but tatty rooms of the set, and a brilliant scene in which Enrico tells Lucia she must marry Arturo: this was set in her bedroom, with childish toys strewn about: to begin with Enrico sang to Lucia's doll (Lucia looked very doll like herself), and later he tied her to the bedstead. This gave the drama, which was set here in Victorian dress, great pyschological power. The orchestra was also wonderful, and I was enchanted by the clever effects in Donizetti's score.
Only the last act was a bit of a letdown, and stops this having a five star rating. Here the somewhat sillier aspects of the production began to grate. One, also seen in the first two acts, was that everyone seemed to come into rooms through windows, instead of doors: why? In the third act, in the mad scene, Lucia was left alone centre stage, with the chorus sat in rows at the side, and part of the scene was done on a sort of stage within a stage, where she embraced Arturo's bloody body. Christy sung well, but somehow I was not as moved by this as I have been other times I saw the opera: it was all a bit static. Then the last scene, set in a crypt, with chairs and photographs to indicate tombs (throughout some chorus members had carried oversized Victorian photos of forbears) was also decidedly odd. Enrico brought in the dead Lucia, who sat on a chair. The maid sat the whole time in the background with her back to the audience (I thought for a while this might be Lucia). The whole act was also very darkly lit. I rather wanted it to be over.
