The soprano Natalie Dessay must thrive under pressure. Singing the touchstone title role of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” in a new production to open the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday night would have been enough to contend with. But Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, believes in presenting opera as a total theatrical package, which includes, when he has the right star in the right show, a promotional campaign that a Broadway mogul like Rocco Landesman would envy. For weeks Ms. Dessay’s picture has been posted, it has seemed, on half the subway stops and buses in New York.
But if the high expectations rattled this petite and charismatic French coloratura soprano, it didn’t show on Monday. A terrific cast was on stage to engage the star in Mary Zimmerman’s production of “Lucia,” and James Levine conducted his first performance of this staple, hard as that is to believe. That the show was simulcast to thousands more on screens in Lincoln Center Plaza and in Times Square just enhanced the sense of event, not to mention the pressure on the performers.
You never know what to expect from Ms. Dessay, one of the most intuitive and risk-taking singers before the public. A few years back she had a dismaying bout of vocal ailments. At the recent tribute to Beverly Sills, she sang an expressive yet vocally wan performance of a Strauss song.
But she sounded glorious on Monday. Her voice has an intriguing mix of qualities. She is essentially a light, lyric soprano with agile coloratura technique. Yet she supports her voice so solidly that her sound shimmers throughout the Met’s vast auditorium. There is that classic French, slightly cool color to her voice. Yet she brings her own kind of richness to the Italian repertory.
Ms. Dessay started her career as an actress and still thinks herself an actress who sings, something that came through in her riveting portrayal. Ms. Zimmerman’s production shifts the Scottish setting of the opera from the time of William and Mary to the early 19th century, roughly the period during which Sir Walter Scott wrote the novel on which the opera is based.
“Lucia di Lammermoor” is a tale of rival families, and poor Lucia is caught in the middle. Her brother, Lord Enrico Ashton, panicked that he has squandered the family holdings through his obsessive battling with the hated Ravenswood clan, wants Lucia to marry the wealthy Lord Arturo. But she has fallen for the Ravenswood heir, Edgardo, whose passion is in some ways as oppressive as her brother’s bullying. Lucia has become a fragile thing who keeps seeing a ghost of an ancestress who was killed by a jealous Ravenswood lover.
Ms. Zimmerman has done some miraculous work in the theater, including her adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” She is newer to opera, and her work here, though compelling, seems less confident. As she has said in recent interviews, “Lucia” is sometimes milked for psychological subtexts, sometimes treated as historic melodrama. A director could treat Lucia’s ghostly visions as evidence of her shaky mental state or as a real part of the world Scott depicts.
Ms. Zimmermam opts to do a little of all these approaches, which could have been a recipe for disaster. Not here, for the most part. The sets deftly mix abstract and storybook imagery: in the first scene, for example, where a mossy mound of grass and brush sits atop shiny geometrical floorboards, with a background of leafless trees.
In trying to make the phantoms of the opera real, Ms. Zimmerman sometimes goes too far, as in Lucia’s first scene, when she appears at the fountain where she has been meeting Edgardo and encountering the ghost. Ms. Dessay looked both striking and pitiable in her sensible walking dress, complete with hat and boots. But as Lucia tells her companion, Alisa, of the ghost she has seen, singing the alluring aria “Regnava nel silenzio,” we see the ghost, a haunted, pasty-faced young woman, who beckons Lucia.
Though a powerful image, it proved a distraction to Ms. Dessay’s lustrous singing. Sometimes in opera, the music alone is the drama, especially when performed as vibrantly as it was here.
Ms. Zimmerman also seems to have been impatient with the dramatically static sextet in Act II, when the distraught Lucia, duped into thinking Edgardo unfaithful, marries Lord Arturo. Edgardo comes bursting into the wedding party, and everything stops as the justly famous sextet begins. Donizetti meant for the main characters to be frozen in place, as they mull over their own thoughts. Nothing happens. That’s the point. The tension is in the soaring and elegant music.
Instead, Ms. Zimmerman invents an action: the wedding participants and guests are gathered together by a photographer for a formal photo. Though the moment was beautifully directed, this staging device, again, overwhelmed the stirring performance of the sextet.
A Grand Opening at the Opera
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But mostly Ms. Zimmerman has imaginative staging ideas and elicits nuanced portrayals from the cast. In Ms. Dessay’s first scene, Lucia breaks into an ecstatic cabaletta to sing of her heady love for Edgardo. Racing about the stage as she sang, Ms. Dessay, in midphrase, skidded on a floorboard and fell down. Born actress that she is, she just kept singing, shrugging her shoulders as if to say, “What are you going to do?,” then finished the aria in triumph. Her response was actually in character for a young woman all giddy in love.
Staging and singing worked in tandem arrestingly during Lucia’s Mad Scene. The set was almost abstract, just a bare balcony and spiral staircase against a backdrop of blue night sky and moon. The crazed Lucia, having stabbed her husband to death on their wedding night, appears on the balcony to the terrified guests. With her huge vacant eyes, just as in those posters all over town, and her bloodied dress, Ms. Dessay moved not with halting steps but in nervous spurts. When she recalled melodic phrases from the love duets, she sang in a voice by turns tremulous, pale, throbbing and unsettlingly brilliant.
Ms. Dessay’s Edgardo was the Italian tenor Marcello Giordani. His singing was not flawless. He sometimes bellowed and lacked pianissimo subtlety. Still, he has genuine Italianate style and an exciting, robust voice. Mariusz Kwiecien has emerged in recent seasons as a major baritone. This handsome and dynamic young Polish artist was a vocally impassioned Enrico, who made that sometimes flat character seem in ways as desperate as the sister he controls.
The commanding bass John Relyea brought rare dignity to the often cardboard role of Raimondo, the chaplain who advises Enrico, causing no end of trouble. An appealing young lyric tenor, Stephen Costello, had a solid Met debut as the well-meaning Arturo.
Presiding over it all was Mr. Levine, who conducted with pliant bel canto grace while keeping the overall performance taut, crisp and articulate. This familiar score has seldom sounded so virile, sweeping and multilayered.
When Mr. Levine appeared for curtain calls, Ms. Dessay bowed down and touched the stage floor in tribute. She probably thinks Mr. Levine’s photos should be plastered all over New York as well. She looks better and will sell more tickets, especially when word gets out.
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