The sound of booing from voices more used to braying is always unpleasant. If anything the yelps and roars at Covent Garden's new Lucia di Lammermoor were more rowdy than those provoked by Bob Wilson's stylised Aida a fortnight ago. On this occasion the outcry was justified, though silence is surely a deadlier weapon.
The attack was confined to the Austro-German production team - director Christof Loy, designer Herbert Murauer, lighting Reinhard Traub.
After the outstanding success of their Ariadne last year, expectations were high, disappointment all the greater. Updating Donizetti's version of Sir Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor to the 1940s was courting trouble. It's not that we want kilts. To remove all sense of Scottish madness and replace it with post-war shell-shocked abstraction - black shirts, grey suits and bowler hats - added nothing.
Updating offers rewards when something is revealed. But Lucia, Italian bel canto at its ornate finest and silliest, doesn't lend itself to to theory or symbol or dark interpretation. The joy is in its set-piece predictability. You don't need to do it alla Pirandello. It is already absurd.
To have the blood-spattered Lucia rushing in for her famous mad scene lugging a suitcase - bulging, presumably, with emotional baggage - provoked giggles in my part of the stalls, not least because she found herself in the midst of a full-scale clothes-off orgy: buggery, the lot. Nothing new there, then.
Musically, Evelino Pido conducted a competent but unremarkable performance, full of fine moments but never sufficiently exciting to blot out the dire staging. Orchestra, including many fine solos, and chorus were on good form.
Andrea Rost made a fragile, nervy Lucia, accomplished rather than dangerous, though she went mad with more vocal colour than her performance up to that point had promised. The bonus of hearing the ghostly glass harmonica in the mad scene, usually replaced by flutes, was a reminder of Donizetti°s genius as an orchestrator.
Anthony Michaels-Moore was suavely eloquent as the bullying brother Enrico. John Relyea sang Raimondo with rather forced volume so you couldn't quite be sure whether he was sympathising or shouting. The Argentinian Marcelo Alvarez as Lucia's lover Edgardo won deserved foot-stamping applause. He saved the day.
Lucia Di Lammermoor
