![]() ![]() If there were a few instances throughout the evening where her physical actions could seem a touch mannered, it was a minor point in a performance that was otherwise close to flawless. Ms Rae, however, saved her finest singing for her very final moments which continued to build in excitement and tension until her fatal collapse. The scene was made all the more mesmerising by the presence of an actual glass harmonica in the orchestra pit the fine performance from Friedrich Heinrich Kern echoed Lucia’s exclamations with an otherworldly ringing. Her crisp enunciation, confident leaps to the high notes and magnificent swells were individually as impressive as her ability to endow a line with dramatic form, adding subtle gradations of power and intensity on her way to the climactic point.Ī staircase emerged from the back of the stage in the second act (in this production the first two acts were combined, and the third act was presented as the second) allowing Ms Rae to make a grand entrance for the famous ‘mad scene’, performed with captivating grace and total technical command. ![]() ![]() From her first appearance, awaiting Edgardo by the fountain, Ms Rae announced that she had the vocal presence to carry the evening. Much of the attention was focused on Brenda Rae, whose Lucia had more than a hint of greatness to it. Mr Daniels, to his great credit, also seemed to have considerable faith in the ability of the singers to fill the dramatic spaces created by the staging and in the course of the evening there was hardly a weak performance to be found. Santa Fe Opera, August 2017 © Santa Fe Opera, 2017 However his penchant for understatement somewhat mitigated the opera’s capacity for high melodrama, and by the end one was left with the sensation of a carefully planned, honestly wrought tragedy.ĭonizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor. If Mr Daniels did have an interpretive vision – and one suspects he did – he was wholly unconcerned with spelling it out. If anything, the staging may have been too subtle: Mr Daniels worked for the most part in small gestures and fleeting allusion – a single, casual moment hinting at possible incest between Lucia and Enrico was all the more chilling for being passed over without comment – which caused the larger, more obviously dramatic scenes to seem untended. Yet while Mr Daniels did have a tendency to concentrate the action at the very front of the stage, and some of the physical movement seemed to be pulled from an antiquated playbook of operatic mannerism, the subsequent scenes revealed a coherent vision of the characters and their conflicting desires. Last year on the very same stage, Mr Daniels had presented an oddly low-key Don Giovanni that seemed to go through the motions without offering much in the way of insight, argument, or even basic engagement with the characters, and on the strength of Lucia’s remarkably static opening chorus one might have expected more of the same. The highly understated, almost imperceptibly subtle staging by Ron Daniels created what appeared to be a neutral environment in which the vocal performances could flourish but as the evening progressed, the staging revealed its psychological depths and narrative mastery, all without ever really drawing attention to itself. The staging was pleasingly subtle and the principals were excellent, but it was Brenda Rae’s transcendent performance of the title role that turned the evening into something close to an event. It may also have been the finest production at this summer’s Santa Fe Opera season. Corrado Rovaris, conductorĪfter a world première ( Steve Jobs), a light entertainment ( Fledermaus), a rarity ( The Golden Cockerel), and an excursion into the baroque period ( Alcina), Lucia di Lammermoor was conspicuous as the token ‘grand classic’, a tightly plotted, craftily composed soprano showcase replete with ill-fated love and a reasonably high death toll. Chorus and Orchestra of the Santa Fe Opera. Brenda Rae (Lucia), Zachary Nelson (Enrico), Mario Chang (Edgardo), Christian Van Horn (Raimondo), Sarah Coit (Alisa), Carlos Santelli (Arturo) and Stephen Martin (Normanno). ![]()
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