LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR
IU OPERA THEATRE, INDIANA USA - 2018
DIRECTED BY JOSE MARIA CONDEMI
LIGHTING DESIGN BY PATRICK VINCENT MERO
LYRIC OPERA OF KANSAS CITY, KANSAS USA - 2020
DIRECTED BY Shawna Lucey
LIGHTING DESIGN BY Michael Clark
CINCINNATI OPERA USA - 2023
DIRECTED BY JOSE MARIA CONDEMI
LIGHTING DESIGN BY THOMAS C. HASE
“The IU Opera Theater’s Lucia di Lammermoor is a musically rich, dramatically taut, lavishly mounted and produced dark spectacle.”
Indiana Public Media
”The production, originating from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, does have some excellent production values.”
”The (hopefully fake) stags' heads upon the wall set the right general tone, as a portrait of a noble house in decline.“
Broadwayworld.com
”Symbolically rich staging for Lyric Opera of Kansas City.”
“The staging was uniformly excellent, with its iron grey walls, its dried flowered arches, parched for lack of water, and mellow candlelight of sconces and candelabra. Sometimes, it is not about pushing boundaries outwards (there were kilts and ball-gowns and hunting trophies to satisfy the most traditional of viewers and nothing in the least unconventional), but rather pushing down deeper into the symbolic possibilities of the opera.”
“The walls, covered with stag head trophies, spoke of the ritual cruelties of the laird’s life as well as the pride of tradition; death was omnipresent at the start, and its connection with a certain traditional understanding of honour and male behaviour. It also set us thinking about the dichotomy (or continuum) of hunter and hunted, killer and victim, a resonance further brought out in the magnificent wedding feast scene, where the guests donned masks of animals typically hunted. You get one role but you play at being the other (continuum not dichotomy). That scene was heavily reminiscent of an Old Masters’ still-life painting, the half-eaten, interrupted banquet, cut across by the macabre bridal appearance, luxury bleeding into decadence bleeding into death. It was off-colour beautiful and appalling at the same time; and the choreography of the chorus at this point, a powerful artistic statement.”
“Powerful also was the portrait gallery wall of Enrico’s study, a tense space vertically laden with ancestral portraits calling to mind the burden of the past, looming over the action and the characters, showing us how little independence they have from any of it. The black veil over the dead mother’s portrait (the whole was set in the Victorian period) was an excellent touch; Enrico twitches it first, surmising its power, and later unveils it, knowing that this will be the trump card, if anything is, in pressurising his sister into a dynastically ‘necessary’ but loveless marriage. Philip Witcomb and Michael James Clark take credit for scene design and exquisite lighting which, when not mellow, was shockingly bright on those ambivalent white garments of innocence.”
Bachtrack.com ★★★★