met lucia review

[lennygoran]

I'm skeptical but will give it a try. Regards, Len

Risking Boos, the Met Opera Puts Present-Day America Onstage


By Joshua Barone

April 22, 2022

Simon Stone paused during a recent rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera, looked up at the stage, and surveyed his new production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Nadine Sierra, singing the title role in a secondhand wedding gown, was preparing to descend the rusting fire escape of an old house for her famous, climactic mad scene.

“She’s covered in blood at this point, so it won’t be as pretty,” Stone said, explaining how Sierra will look when the staging opens on April 23. “Or maybe it will be even prettier.”

Pretty or not, this mad scene will be different than any “Lucia” — any production, period — in the Met’s history. Many directors have updated classic operas, like the company’s most recent “Rigoletto” stagings, set in 1960s Las Vegas and Weimar-era Berlin.

But by transporting Donizetti’s bel canto tragedy to present-day America for his Met debut, Stone is breaking new ground. And risking boos: Luc Bondy’s 2009 “Tosca” is a reminder that playing around with the classics can infuriate a house that doesn’t welcome departures from tradition.



“There is always a chance of upsetting people who don’t want to see something different,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “I do think that over the years during my tenure, even the older elements of the audience have become more adventurous. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to love it, but hopefully everyone is going to be stimulated.”




As Sierra slowly made her way down the fire escape, she was surrounded by fragments of a faded postindustrial town: a drab motel, a pawnshop, a liquor store with an A.T.M. to pick up cash for drug deals. Where the opera’s libretto depicts a decaying and desperate aristocracy in 16th-century Scotland, Stone has found contemporary resonances and turned the Met stage into something of a graveyard of the American dream — a landscape of opioid abuse, economic hardship and the last, dangerous gasp of white male power.

Both Stone and Sierra are veterans of European houses, where a production like this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary; at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, for example, Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” has a similar look in David Bösch’s 2016 staging, with a group of older men exerting outsize control over their economically depressed community. And Peter Sellars directed distinctly American contemporary takes on Mozart in the 1980s. But the new “Lucia” is uncharted territory for the Met, and a test for traditionalists.

“I hope people give it a chance and not be prejudiced before they are able to sense it a bit,” Sierra said in an interview. “Art is ever-evolving, and if we’re always stuck in the same thing, we’re only speaking about history; we’re not creating history.”



BORN IN AUSTRALIA and now based in Vienna, Stone, 37, is best known to New Yorkers as a theater director who adapts classic texts about desperate women to mirror modern times. His “Medea,” which ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early 2020, was a stripped-down portrait of a marriage in free fall. And when his unsparing and fluid treatment of Lorca’s “Yerma” — an argument for how the internet can make urban life feel as petty and small as the original play’s rustic village — traveled to the Park Avenue Armory in 2018, it attracted raves.

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It also caught Gelb’s eye. “I was enormously impressed by the magic of the production,” he recalled. “It was a tour de force of directing and storytelling.”




Gelb approached Stone, who was then just emerging as an opera director, and they arrived at “Lucia,” which will not be the last of his productions at the Met. His staging of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered last summer at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, is coming to New York in a future season. And Gelb said that they have also discussed a potential show created from scratch, in which Stone would serve as librettist and director.

Stone’s opera résumé has leaned on 20th-century and contemporary works, such as Aribert Reimann’s “Lear,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and, most recently, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” But having directed “La Traviata” in Paris in 2019 — transforming Violetta into a digital influencer — he said he was attracted to the classic Italian repertory because “there’s something so dramaturgically strong” about it.

“I find with 20th-century opera, your job is to make it as accessible and clear as possible,” he said. “But with Italian operas, the music is so timeless and recognizable. It’s like Shakespeare: You’re not going to surprise people with what happens at the end of ‘Hamlet.’ What you can do then is really explore the contemporary relevance of these classics. So it’s a different job; you can flex your muscles as a director more.”

Some might say that relevant art needs no updating because it registers regardless of context, the way a poem or novel can speak clearly across centuries. But Stone prefers to make those connections literal — in the service, he believes, of the audience.

“Opera is the most beautiful and total of art forms, and it sparks every fiber of your being as well as provokes all of your thoughts and fantasies,” he said. “And I don’t think that can really happen if you consider a distance from it and think, ‘That’s set somewhere else, at another time, and that’s not about me.’”

Hence a “Lucia” for the age of white nationalist rallies and the Jan. 6 insurrection. “The ‘marginalized’ men who used to be in charge, who now think they have to fight for their last shred of dignity — it’s a genuine problem in America,” Stone said. “Everything’s changed: The economy’s fallen apart, and the ideas of masculinity have been turned upside down, and they act out and they create political mischief.”

Caught between the conflicts of men like that is Lucia — her bully of an older brother, Enrico (Artur Rucinski), scheming to keep her from the man she loves, Edgardo (Javier Camarena), and forcing her to marry a more promising match against her will. Driven to murder by it all, she is, Stone said, “a woman trying to survive, to create a future for herself, to be independent, but being ground to dust by the patriarchy around her.”

A COMMON FEATURE of Stone’s hyper-realistic opera productions is a turntable. His sets rotate, changing — sometimes drastically — with each revolution. At the Met, live film gathered by onstage cameras will also be projected above the action, giving the show a split-screen appearance to convey parallel stories and, increasingly, Lucia’s slipping sanity.

“I’ve never had a camera in my face before, but I’ve always somehow been able to think of the acting onstage in a film-like way,” Sierra said. “Maybe that’s because as a kid I did theater. So this is marrying the two sides of me.”

Flexible architecture is also crucial to Stone’s style. In Act II of his “Tote Stadt,” the house of Act I is shattered and surreally spread throughout the stage. Similarly, the town of this “Lucia” begins to match its protagonist’s mind, eventually arriving at a fragmented cluster of buildings in the mad scene.

“The emotional impact of space is transformed continuously depending on what happens there and what angle we look at it from,” Stone said. “The most extreme version of that is when the architecture doesn’t make sense anymore: doors and staircases to nowhere, walking out of a food mart and into a living room.”

Among his inspirations has been the dreamy illogic of Michel Gondry’s film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Opera, he said, should be the same: “If it’s going mad, it always feels weird for the production not to go mad.”

Stone was still refining the details in recent rehearsals, with a meticulous eye on the speed of the turntable and whether one of the singers should be wearing a jacket instead of a cardigan. With such specificity, Gelb said, “it’s a show that’s going to keep the Met on its toes.”

Still, Stone said, he eventually had to step back and make room for the music. The conductor, Riccardo Frizza, said that he was aiming to match the production by bringing out “the modernity of this score,” with a focus on transparency and emphases on certain words in the libretto. At the same time he, was also seeking to balance the orchestra’s sound to resemble the historically informed approach he takes at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo, Italy, where he is the music director.

When a performance snaps into place, Frizza said, the score’s enduring themes emerge naturally: “The way Donizetti builds the whole structure around Lucia from the beginning to the mad scene — he was a great man of theater, but also one important for showing us the whole face of a woman in this opera.”

At the very least, her story speaks to the soprano portraying her. “I’ve been through things, like men trying to control my situation or break my heart or put me through a roller coaster of dominance versus being submissive,” Sierra said. “And that’s really what ‘Lucia’ is about.”

Sierra, who has sung the role before, has found it easier to interpret in a contemporary setting. “It’s more natural than my trying to play someone from the 16th century,” she said. “Now I can do Lucia almost like playing myself. I think the audience is going to feel it a little bit stronger than my portraying a girl of the past.”

That is among the reasons Stone hopes that those who come to see the show will not struggle with it. He went so far as to call the production conservative for its insistence on clarity.

“I don’t think people need to be shocked by it,” he added, “and I don’t think anyone who is watching and listening to the music and being there in the moment, rather than stuck in the past in their mind, won’t have a great time. I’m a show person. I want the audience to have fun.”

[maestrob]

It's all about the directors now, isn't it? Not a word here about the soul-searching divas and divos that will be inhabiting these roles.

The whole article takes the singing so much for granted that I'm not sold at all on this production.

Gone are the days...

[lennygoran]

It's all about the directors now, isn't it? Not a word here about the soul-searching divas and divos that will be inhabiting these roles.

The whole article takes the singing so much for granted that I'm not sold at all on this production.

Gone are the days...

Bria yeah-here we are just getting over the vegas rigoletto and the bundy tosca and along comes this lucia. Sue and I are on the road right now up here near boston for a wedding. Finally some nice weather. And maybe a little more freedom from the darn corona! Regards, Len

[lennygoran]

And now this review from the NYTimes-what I expected and dreaded. Regards, Len


Review: In ‘Lucia’ at the Met, a Modern Woman Comes Undone

Simon Stone’s new staging of Donizetti’s classic opera updates the work to a present-day American town — hold (some of) the madness.



By Zachary Woolfe

April 24, 2022

Lucia di Lammermoor

By the looks of it, there is little in common between the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” and the one it replaces.

The old staging, which premiered in 2007 and was last revived in 2018, set Donizetti’s work — about a girl driven to murder by a forced marriage — in the late Victorian era, with sumptuous gowns and picturesque, wintry trees. The new “Lucia,” which opened on Saturday and is directed by Simon Stone, takes place in the present day, in a dying postindustrial American town, the kind whose electoral preferences have so fascinated the world over the past six or seven years.

There’s a motel, a pawnshop, liquor and drug stores, a mini-mart, a water treatment plant, some beat-up cars: “the wasteland,” as Stone has described it, “of free-market capitalism.” The costumes are less sumptuous than expressly tacky. There’s nothing Victorian, nothing picturesque. Video, much of it captured live by an onstage cameraman, often fills a screen stretching above the singers.

And yet this seemingly fresh, contemporary, multimedia take on a Romantic classic suffers from exactly the same fundamental problem as the 2007 staging, directed by Mary Zimmerman: an unwillingness to show its heroine — one of the most anguished characters in opera, whose life ends in the wake of an extended, eerie mad scene — as truly tormented.

Now, as then, there is a dull emptiness at the work’s center. While scenically intriguing and superbly sung and played — with Nadine Sierra, Javier Camarena and Artur Rucinski in excellent voice, and Riccardo Frizza conducting with fluidity, briskness and grandeur — this new “Lucia” is ultimately unaffecting and unpersuasive.

It was certainly reasonable for the Met to entrust the piece to Stone, a 37-year-old Australian director who has made something of a specialty of unsparing modern-dress depictions of desperate women in theater productions like “Yerma” and “Medea.”

And his updating makes sense on paper. “Lucia” is based on a novel that entranced the Romantics: Walter Scott’s “The Bride of Lammermoor,” set in Scotland around the turn of the 18th century. It was a time when that country’s aristocracy felt itself mortally threatened by an approaching union with England, a tumult that Scott translated into a fervid landscape of bulls charging out of forests and ghost-haunted fountains, their water reddened with blood.

Donizetti, thoroughly uninterested in the details of history, and his librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, made the novel’s political and religious conflicts almost entirely personal. There are two implacably opposed clans, which have produced a pair of star-crossed lovers, “Romeo and Juliet” style. Enrico Ashton, his fortunes in tatters, seeks to revive himself by engineering an advantageous marriage for his sister, Lucia; too bad she’s secretly betrothed herself to Edgardo Ravenswood, her family’s mortal enemy.




But this drama, however intimate, is still shaped by its social context: the distress of a class and gender that feel themselves being squeezed out. A similar dynamic, of course, is playing out in America today — so why not set the opera in America today? As Stone said in an interview on the Met’s website, “It’s always in these moments, where men feel that they and their sources of income are threatened, that misogyny and patriarchal abuses resurge.”

Yet if “Lucia” — whether in 1700, 1870 or 2022 — is about the impact of patriarchal abuses on an increasingly isolated young woman, we still need to register that impact if the opera is to have stakes and stature. She is a character, after all, who, we are told from the start, is utterly distraught, mourning her mother’s death even before the onset of worse afflictions — a character who weeps, swoons, trembles and is often, as the libretto puts it, “beside herself with misery and fear.”

Sung with confident agility and womanly fullness rather than vulnerability, Sierra’s Lucia, though, spends much of the performance oddly unperturbed and sane, even happy. Rather than the figure indicated by the libretto and score — who nervously vaults from desolate to ecstatic and back again, her repressed passions surging before she’s cowed once more into silence — in this portrayal she is so even-keeled and robust that we feel little of the patient accretion of pressure on her, the pressure that culminates in killing her arranged husband, Arturo, on their wedding night.

If that crime doesn’t feel preordained, with the grim inevitability that defines tragedy, the drama goes limp, no matter how nicely vocalized. Even the supertitles on Saturday lowered the emotional temperature: “Il pallor funesto, orrendo, che ricopre il volto mio,” as Lucia describes herself to her brother, means something far more dire than merely “the look you see on my face.”

And while there is certainly more than a whiff of toxic masculinity in Rucinski’s skeevy, face-tattooed Enrico — sung with evenness and power — and in Matthew Rose’s sonorous, ineffectual pastor Raimondo, a deeper working-out of Stone’s notion of a permeatingly anxious patriarchy would require a rougher, tougher, more ominous Edgardo. Often seeming as fixated on his enmity toward Enrico as on his love of Lucia, this character actually contributes to her burden rather than relieving it. But Camarena — a golden-voiced, long-phrased tenor, genial to his core — comes across as a harmless sweetheart. The stakes are lowered once again.



In that interview with the Met, published in February, Stone described his plan to make Lucia an opioid addict.“I wanted to portray a more complex journey than just that she was made to choose between one of two men,” he said, “and being with the wrong one turned her into a psychopathic killer.”

That all-too-simple journey, though, is the one he has presented; the addiction idea seems to have been dropped during rehearsals. But whether the cause is men, drugs, mourning, temperament or all of the above, if we don’t feel Lucia as perilously fragile from the start, her fate feels unearned — far more sudden than Donizetti and Cammarano’s gradual, carefully calibrated trajectory of degradation and madness.

The staging’s set is more evocative of circling insanity than its title character is. Stone favors near-constant motion onstage, and for this “Lucia,” Lizzie Clachan has designed a perpetually rotating and transforming little town, its structures collapsed into and overlapping one another, like a Cubist sculpture. For the final act, the buildings are broken into fragments, still turning, a sinister merry-go-round.

It’s an ambitious and impressive spectacle, yet it also contains an uncomfortable edge of too-easy tourism for a moneyed crowd at the Met to be watching a spectacle of misogyny and violence set in a trashy Middle America. The result is the opposite of the intended relevance; this opera may have been updated to our moment — eliciting some boos from traditionalists during Stone’s bow on Saturday — but the implication is that it’s not really us.

And given the hypernaturalistic trappings, some details ring false. Where in 21st-century America are people going to drive-ins, let alone to watch Bob Hope noir parodies? “WORD SON YO!!!” is the kind of graffiti concocted by someone who’s never seen graffiti. And while it makes sense that Edgardo and Lucia could not have communicated from afar in the libretto’s Scottish Highlands, the explanation for their radio silence in today’s world strains credulity, even by operatic standards.

The production’s film elements are sometimes evocative, mostly when they provide private, close-up moments, like Lucia in her bedroom, quietly making a watercolor for Edgardo. But by the end of the opera — when an elaborate black-and-white depiction of the couple’s imagined life together competes with Sierra’s mad scene — the movies are just too much.

And while she sings that scene with utter poise, accompanied by a spectral glass harmonica, Stone plops right into Grand Guignol mode, with Lucia’s wedding dress so drenched in red that — coupled with her staring creepily at the camera once it’s over — you can’t help but think of cheap slasher films. Lucia is even stalked by a horde of bloodied Arturo doubles.

It’s too little guts, too late.

[maestrob]

While scenically intriguing and superbly sung and played — with Nadine Sierra, Javier Camarena and Artur Rucinski in excellent voice, and Riccardo Frizza conducting with fluidity, briskness and grandeur — this new “Lucia” is ultimately unaffecting and unpersuasive.

Making Lucia an opioid addict?????

Why am I not surprised at this .

[Rach3]

Soprano Nadine Sierra on singing Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”:

https://www.wqxr.org/story/interview-na ... ing-lucia/ ( 14 minutes )

[lennygoran]

Soprano Nadine Sierra on singing Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”:

Steve, thanks-this Wed-the dreaded moment-we'll be seeing it HD style Met HD style in rockaway NJ. Wonder if I can sneak some red wine into the movie house to go with the roast beef sandwiches! Regards, Len