I love Lucy

The Lyric's new slant on Donizetti

by Lloyd Schwartz

Much of the Boston Lyric Opera's season-opening production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor could have been staged almost anywhere. Ham and corn are the featured menu. Characters fling themselves onto the stage, or onto one another; villains skulk with sinister intent; the heroine lurches in a classically deranged fashion. But there's at least one new slant. Set designer Allen Moyer has everyone lurching and skulking some 20 degrees north of perpendicular on the most dizzyingly tilted opera stage I can remember. It's like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari -- one fears for the safety of the performers. A boar's head hanging on a wall covered with Gothic tracery (but is this wallpaper or an outside wall?), a row of black chairs, and three huge tilted black girder-towers (indoors? outdoors?) all tell us that poor Lucy of Lammermoor's world is morally and psychologically askew. The famous Mad Scene starts before the music begins -- and it never stops.

About the production, director Christopher Alden writes that he and Moyer "have chosen to take it out of its traditional 17th-century costumes and put it in the period in which it was composed, the newly industrialized 19th century" -- a time, he says, when "women's increasing disenfranchisement from virtually all forms of social choice enclosed them within the ornate walls of the middle-class household."

Were women any more "disenfranchised" in the 19th century than in the 17th? And what in Donizetti's opera about Sir Henry (Enrico) Ashton's brutality toward his sister Lucy (Lucia), or in the novel by Sir Walter Scott the opera is loosely based on, suggests anything about the middle class? Some of the choices by Alden and Moyer made the audience giggle. At the start, Enrico's henchmen are out combing his estate for his sworn enemy, Sir Edgardo di Ravenswood, to the tune of some 1835 hunting music. Moyer dresses them in frock coats, top hats, and white gloves. They sit down on and stand up from their chairs in military synchronization. Later, all the guests carry these very chairs in with them to Lucia's wedding.

Lighting designer Adam Silverman's idea is to make an abrupt shift for each musical set piece, which might be okay if these shifts were less gimmicky ('60s strobe effects and spotlights in the viewers' eyes), more consistent, and let you see the singers' faces when you most wanted to (in the great Sextet, for instance). When Normanno -- demoted here from Captain of the Guards to Enrico's butler -- lights the kilted Lord Arturo Bucklaw's cigarette with a cigarette lighter, and Christmas-tree lights descend for the wedding scene, we know we're not in the 19th century at all but in some opera-director Neverland.

One staging idea that might actually have worked had it been planned with greater subtlety concerned what Lucia can do during the trills and roulades (with flute) of her Mad Scene. Most coloraturas dart about the stage chasing some invisible bird. Alden has Dominique Labelle holding the large carving knife she's just murdered Lord Arturo with and jabbing it at the terrified wedding guests (all presciently dressed in black) in time to the music. Too many notes, too many jabs -- the startled looks of the guests punctuate the Mad Scene with guffaws.

So here we are again at the Boston Lyric Opera, where whoever oversees such decisions can't seem to tell the difference between a good idea and a trendy one, especially the ill-conceived attempt to turn a colorful entertainment like Lucia into something falsely serious, heavy, and drab (with a touch of incest). When the director and his designers appeared for their curtain call, the ovation for the singers and the conductor precipitously cooled.

Let's close our eyes, then, and get back to the singers. If two of them weren't so good, you could dismiss this production out of hand. But it has the one indispensable element of a good Lucia: a great Lucia. Dominique Labelle, once one of Phyllis Curtin's prize students at BU, has developed into one our most prized singers. Her lyric soprano is so much warmer and more richly textured than most coloraturas, you might not expect her to be warbling this role. Yet how thrilling to hear her dazzling and complex musical embellishments (and all in character), and how glorious to hear a full-out, beautifully rounded high E flat at the end of the Mad Scene (a note I wish she'd hold just a bit longer, though, to nail the over-the-top grandeur of Donizetti's climax).

From her first entrance Labelle suggests Lucia's vulnerability, and everything else she does builds from that. The shuddering trills in her first aria, "Regnava nel silencio," gorgeously executed, set the Gothic tone more vividly than anything we have to look at. And she's repaid for her vocal and dramatic gifts by being stuck in a grim Victorian dress, under an ugly wig, and with Halloween make-up, having to negotiate that radically raked stage.

At least she has a co-star of comparable gifts. Tenor Stephen Mark Brown makes a dashing and a sympathetic hero, the bereaved and betrayed Edgardo. He has a firm, clear, even, silvery tone, bottom to top, estimable if not exactly radiant. He poses like tenors of old, but there's also an earnestness of expression and real conviction in his phrasing. Edgardo's last-act suicide aria, in the graveyard where Lucia is being buried, is one of the glories of bel canto opera, and Brown sang it with power and passion. Lots of people never hear this aria because they think the opera ends with Lucia's Mad Scene. Met tenor Barry Morrell used to stab himself at the top of a long staircase then roll down the whole flight of steps just to get the audience's attention. Brown rolls just one step off the edge of the stage onto the apron, where the graveyard was placed. But no one would have dreamed of leaving.

With regard to the music, this was a fairly complete Lucia. I'm happy to have heard the "Wolf Crag" scene in the third act, in which Enrico and Edgardo plan their duel. At least it gives Edgardo a little more to sing. It also gives Enrico more to sing. Eduardo del Campo is a sturdy baritone with a good snarl, but his low notes bottom out early, and his high notes tend to be loud, dry, and flat.

There was good support from Frank Kelley (Normanno), Kelly Anderson (Raimondo, the Ashtons' chaplain), Ruthann Manley (Alisa, Lucia's companion, her small part here worked up to make some proto-feminist statement by having her hand Lucia's carving knife to Edgardo with the suggestion that he use it on himself), and especially bright-voiced Mark Evans as the hapless bridegroom, Arturo, whom Lucia stabs on their wedding night (he and Labelle are married in real life, too).

The chorus was tighter than usual at Lyric productions. And Stephen Lord led an atmospheric orchestral performance, with Linda Toote the Mad Scene flutist and Martha Moor the haunting harp soloist in the haunted fountain scene. (Remaining performances at the Emerson Majestic are this Friday evening, October 24, and Sunday afternoon, October 26.)

Keith Lockhart conducting the New England Conservatory Orchestra seemed like a great idea. Give the kids the experience of working with a celebrity; and give the celebrity a chance to do something for his new community. But the resulting concert a week ago Thursday -- Lockhart's first "serious" classical concert in Boston -- was an ordeal. After all, this aggregation -- one of three recently reconceived NEC student orchestras and one of drastically mixed levels of experience -- had been playing together for barely a month. Even after five rehearsals with Lockhart (and three advance "preparations" by the BSO's Ronald Feldman), they were far from ready for a major public event.

Lockhart got them through the bobbled solos, ragged ensemble, queasy intonation, and unbridled loudness that often mark student performances (though not usually at NEC). But you also had the feeling that with his limited range of gestures (toes together -- rise and dip; toes apart -- rise and dip; elbows flapping a kind of funky chicken) and relentless square tempos (his priority was evidently keeping the group together), he wasn't likely to teach them much about phrasing, style, or what makes Dvorák's Carnival Overture, Copland's Appalachian Spring, and Beethoven's Pastorale such different pieces. Under these conditions, though, even Toscanini might have looked bad.

Esther Budiardjo's piano recital the following night was another story. A Celebrity Series "Emerging Artist," Budiardjo, born 24 years ago in Jakarta, is one of the marvelous protégées of Russell Sherman and, for the last decade, Sherman's wife, Wha Kyung Byun. The program was unusual, beginning with six Mendelssohn Songs without Words, Opus 30 (a little stiff -- the best being the Venetian Gondola Song), and George Perle's elegant Six New Études (1984), more fancifully played: that herky-jerky Gigue; those obsessively fluttering, sinister butterflies in Papillons; the keyboard-sweeping Perpetuum mobile, with Budiardjo playing the notes so fast (and playing every one of them) they sounded like glissandos.

The first half ended with Balakirev's Islamey: Oriental Fantasy, a nominee for the most difficult piano solo ever written. Budiardjo's technique is staggering, but she also made the swirl of notes a real dance, full of color, piquancy, and charm.

She returned from intermission with no less than Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, in a performance of unhurried ease that was also a study in contrasts: moments of exquisite delicacy -- now poignant, now playful (the hilarious seesawing of overblown and mousy chords in the 13th variation) -- alternating with moments of elegiac solemnity, passages of great brilliance with passages of touching simplicity, grand declarations with sudden oases of pure calm and deep contemplation. Each variation had its clear and separate identity, yet they all added up to a large, unified vision of life in a complicated world.

After the Diabellis, I didn't especially want to hear anything else. But Budiardjo's choice of William Bolcom's teasing Rag Infernale and a semi-crossover piece from her husband Timothy Pickett's A Jazz and Classical Affair were further proof of her lively and unconventional contemporary sensibility.