Lucia di Lammermoor: A Staging of Great Emotional Power.
Southam Hall at the NAC (Ottawa) vibrated with the arias of Donizetti last night as the firey Egardo (Marc Hervieux) and the silver toned Lucia (Lyubov Petrova) vowed eternal love and then melted into passionate embraces and heart wrenching despair. Blood, vengeance, madness and suicide all the stuff of shameless melodrama because absolutely enthralling in the story of these ill fated lovers, victim of a family feud in 17th Century Scotland.
The set of act II, “The Mariage contract” with its magnificent upper gallery, its long winding stairway, its dark passageways and long shadowy hallways, was the perfect place for the appearance of ghosts, troubled spirits and the madwoman of the chateau who slaughters her husband with a bloody knife and then comes slowly downstairs looking for her absent lover. This is the stuff that must have intrigued Sir Walter Scott, author of the novel that inspired the libretto. He certainly had a perfectly theatrical imagination because his text conjures up images of Macbeth, of Hamlet (Ophelia), of Romeo and Juliet, of Gisèle and of all the most tragically mad figures of theatre and literature that one could desire. Lucia is a bit of all that and with Donizetti,s melodic music the artistic and musical direction by Tyrone Paterson as well as the general direction by Tom Charlton,, success is guaranteed.
