Here is my Wednesday October 12 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Monday October 10, 2010 opening night of Lucia di Lammermoor at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Posting here was delayed by a change in travel schedule.
Lucia (Susanna Phillips) pleads with her lover Edgardo (Giuseppe Filianoti) in Lyric Opera’s staging of Lucia di Lammermoor.| Rich Hein~Sun-Times
Lyric Opera’s ‘Lucia’ short on its delivery
BY ANDREW PATNER
◆ Through November 5
◆ Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive
◆ Tickets, $34-$244
◆ (312) 332-2244; lyricopera.org
RECOMMENDED
The third and final act of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s sort-of new, sort-of production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor brought a wedding banquet, a murder, female hysteria and insanity, a confrontation on a gloomy Scottish moor, a suicide, and a reunion of lovers in death.
That’s the case with any presentation of this 1835 bel canto potboiler, drawn from a Sir Walter Scott best seller of its day. Monday night at the Civic Opera House, the last hour also took the lid off some of the lead singers in what had seemed before intermission little more than acceptable second-cast or regional opera work.
When this season was announced, Ryan Opera Center alum Susanna Phillips struck many as being too early in her career for a title role that belonged in their days to powerhouse prima donnas and great artists Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. Lyric’s more recent Lucias, June Anderson and Natalie Dessay, also were well into international accomplishment when they took up this ultimate lyric-coloratura part and its (in)famous Mad Scene.
If Phillips and her colleagues had to be judged here by the work’s first two acts, an honest assessment would have to be pretty harsh. Not only were the singers disappointing and debuting Italian conductor Massimo Zanetti’s tempos erratic, Zanetti seemed to have no connection with the cast and its strengths and limitations, regularly drowning them out with the orchestra, even in the much-loved Act 2 sextet.
Soprano Catherine Malfitano’s first Chicago offering as a stage director didn’t help, either. A great and often admirable scene-chewer in her day -- 20 roles at Lyric alone starting in 1975 -- her work gave little evidence of understanding that directing others is a wholly different art form from individual performance. While audiences chafe at “concept” productions and over-analyzed, over-explained dramaturgy, here Malfitano usually offered nothing at all but people standing -- often, as in the sextet, quite far from one another -- on a dark stage, neither interacting nor giving us any idea of who they were or why they were consumed with rage, envy, jealousy, or mad passion.
Then there was that third act, though, and Phillips delivered a creditable Mad Scene, on Wilson Chin’s high, narrow, curving tower staircase. With harpist Marguerite Lynn Williams and flutist Jean W. Berkenstock providing the only musical railings for this poor girl, driven to murder and insanity by the machinations of her evil, vendetta-obsessed brother, the American soprano brought musicality and impressive vocal choices to all parts of the scene. Perhaps some day she will grow in theatrical depth and allure as well.
There was much anticipation for the more experienced Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti as her denied and headstrong lover (with a particularly great name for Chicago opera buffs), Edgardo di Ravenswood. Filianoti has had recent triumphs here in Donizetti’s own comedy, The Elixir of Loveand in Salzburg with Riccardo Muti as Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth. But even his beautiful voice and confident stage manner were not always enough to overcome the large Civic Opera house. Still, when singing alone as the tensions build and resolve in the final scene, he delivered his big aria well, even if he added a few too many tears to Edgardo’s already ultra-weepy cabaletta.
The breakout performance here was from another Lyric alum, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, as the meddling tutor Raimondo, who probably thinks that he’s truly helping Lucia. With both the restored Act 2 aria and especially later with the chilling “Dalle stanze ove Lucia,” announcing to the wedding party Lucia’s murder of the man she was forced to marry, Van Horn made good on the promise he showed during his Ryan years.
In his Lyric debut, Irish and American baritone Brian Mulligan took up the role of Enrico only recently when the announced singer withdrew due to an illness in his family. Perhaps due to the short preparation, he never made clear the cruel motivations of Lucia’s bullying brother. (Ryan alum Quinn Kelsey will take the role for the two Nov. dates.)
Current popular Ryan Center tenor RenéBarbera suffered from unfortunate costuming (by Wilmette native Terese Wadden) as the doomed arranged groom Lord Arturo Bucklaw, looking more like the bearded lady Baba the Turk than the Scottish boy-heir from the castle next door. Ryan second-year baritone Paul Scholten was an impressive Normanno but first-year mezzo Cecelia Hall fell victim to Zanetti’s surging volume and Malfitano’s inattention. Even Michael Black’s fine chorus had a time with these issues.
Chin had some nice stage pictures, especially with a moorscape inspired by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, and it was good to have Lyric’s former resident lighting magician Duane Schuler back in town. But too often this second entry in what is very much The Transition Season from William Mason to Anthony Freud as general director smacked of cost savings and lack of imagination.
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