Messing around with Lucia

Lucia di Lammermoor
Coliseum

Gentle Giant
Linbury Studio

Despite two attempts, I haven’t managed to see ENO’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor with its announced cast. My first try was sabotaged, as so many plans are, by Network Rail, which is still after 12 years working on ‘essential maintenance’ of a ten-mile stretch of track between Stevenage and Cambridge, so that the last train from King’s Cross leaves at 21.52, compelling me to leave before Act III. On my second try the Lucia and Enrico were both too ill to sing, and indeed the replacement Lucia was ill too, but womanfully sang despite that. Operatic love-duet singing is a high-risk occupation when there are chest infections around. Still, even if the performance won’t become a legend of operatic history, it was remarkably assured and very enjoyable. For that most credit must go to Paul Daniel, who revealed a gift for balancing the varying, often seemingly conflicting elements in bel canto to create as convincing a whole as his director David Alden would allow. On my second visit Daniel had to keep the orchestra down, though the only stretch where that mattered much was the great sextet, which does ideally require six healthy young vocal animals to let rip with a surging accompaniment; that self-evidently didn’t happen here.

I found the young New Zealander Lurelle Alefounder a more sympathetic singer than Anna Christy, because she has a rounder voice, while Christy is of the bell-toned variety. Actually the production suits Christy’s voice, in that Lucia as conceived by Alden is a doll, as well as constantly holding one; she is also, one need hardly add, a victim of child abuse, with her dastardly brother Enrico, excellently portrayed by the stand-in David Stephenson, molesting her in her cot-bed, and exemplifying the decadence of the Ashton family, whose house falls apart before our eyes, as many top-hatted repossessors look on impassively.