Five stars for La Scala’s Lucia di Lammermoor — star cast leaves audience delirious

Old-fashioned starry casting remains the best way to ensure box-office success in Milan, and Juan Diego Flórez and Lisette Oropesa have done the trick for La Scala’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor. The duo did not disappoint on the opening night, when La Scala’s exacting audience filled the auditorium with untypically delirious applause.

Adapted from Walter Scott’s historical novel, Donizetti’s dramma tragico centres on Lucia’s tragic fate after Enrico, her brother, arranges her marriage to settle his financial woes. La Scala originally conceived the production to open the season in 2020 but cancelled the performances because of lockdown. The Milan house has bided its time, rescheduling the run to coincide with Flórez and Oropesa’s availability.

That, in hindsight, was a smart move, with Flórez ensuring a stirringly dramatic and noble reading of the opera’s hero, Edgardo. At the age of 50, the Peruvian tenor, who has been drawn to some heavier romantic roles of late, has lost little of his trademark burnish, his high-lying voice soaring incandescently through Donizetti’s voluptuous bel canto lines. Flórez infused his crystal-clear Italian text with affecting pathos.

Oropesa was not upstaged, the soprano streaming through acrobatic coloratura runs with a crystalline precision that never interrupted the shapely flow of her phrases. Her slender-toned interpretation radiated a tenderness and fragility that made Lucia’s demise at the hands of a brutal patriarchal society especially compelling. Accompanied by otherworldly glass harmonica rather than flute, Oropesa delivered a riveting mad scene, her chemistry with Flórez electrifying from the opening duet.

Music director Riccardo Chailly, an erstwhile musical revisionist, formed the third pillar of this performance, drawing playing that teemed with unfamiliar detail, from grimly slithering lower strings to explosive marches that fizzled into skittering waltzes. The conductor locked into the vocal lines with spacious changes in speed, artfully colouring onstage contributions rather than smothering them.

Chailly has selected a two-year-old edition of the score for this production that reinstates music cut in most performances today, claiming that it ensures better flow throughout the opera. It was arguably more the conductor’s craftsmanship, however, that cohered playing into a seamless whole, Chailly painting entire scenes with the breadth and rich detail of an enormous fresco.

Boris Pinkhasovich’s menacing Enrico, a convincing counterweight to Edgardo’s authentic love, and Michele Pertusi’s ponderous Raimondo ensured this was much more than a two-singer show. There were further strong contributions from Valentina Pluzhnikova (Alisa) and Leonardo Cortellazzi (Arturo). La Scala’s irrepressible chorus gave stirring interjections.

The audience reserved a smattering of indignant boos for Yannis Kokkos’s uneventful staging that failed to flesh out decorative backdrops, including a forest complete with large statues of wild animals, with an obvious overarching concept. Given the quality of the playing and singing, that hardly mattered. As in the days when Renata Scotto, Beverly Sills and Luciano Pavarotti graced La Scala’s stage in performances of Lucia, on this occasion music was paramount.

★★★★★

To May 5, teatroallascala.org