SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor: : Vancouver Opera, soloists, Jonathan Darlington (conductor), Amiel Gladstone (director), Gerard Howland (set designer), Sue LePage (costume designer), David Fraser (lighting designer), Leslie Dala (chorus director), Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 11.12.2010 (BJ)

Comparisons are proverbially odious. But a critic faced with a second production of Lucia di Lammermoor within the space of a few weeks is duty-bound to make them.

The Vancouver Opera is an excellent company. I have generally found the work of its music director, Jonathan Darlington, to be highly accomplished, its orchestral standards high, and many of its productions, such as the notable recent world premiere of Lillian Alling, eminently effective. So I am as surprised as I am disappointed to have to say that this Lucia did not come within a mile of rivaling the quality of the production Seattle Opera mounted less than two months ago.

There were strengths, certainly. One of them was a quite superb tenor in the person of Michael Fabiano, whose Edgardo was sung with tone both ringing and seductive, aside from a couple of notes at the top of the range that were less than ideally free. The Turkish-born bass-baritone Burak Bilgili was a strong-voiced Raimondo. And the Lucia, the young Cuban-born Eglise Guttiérrez, is a soprano both vocally alluring and dramatically charming. But I observed of her otherwise wonderful Gilda in Vancouver two seasons ago that “a note or two here and there seemed to emerge rather too strongly from the line,” and it was sad to observe, seventeen months later, that the problem had increased to the point where there really was no truly coherent line to speak of. The ability to float a delicate pianissimo high note is essential for a Lucia, but no less essential is the art to integrate it into a smoothly projected arc of tone. Ms. Guttiérrez would be well advised to do some very serious work on cultivating that art if she is to stand any chance of fulfilling her genuinely exceptional potential.

For the rest, the evening was both musically and dramatically underwhelming. At tempos that sometimes dragged, the orchestra sounded much less polished than usual, especially where the horns and some of the woodwinds were concerned. Leslie Dala’s chorus sang well enough, but its involvement in the action was minimal, and this brings us to the most depressing aspect of the production, which is that so much of what happened on stage seemed unmotivated.

Gerald Howland’s set, borrowed from the San Francisco Opera, took the interior of a sufficiently impressive castle and tilted it back 90 degrees into the horizontal, so that we were looking as it were up through the building to the sky. A pretty conceit. But why? What was it supposed to mean? The so-called fountain whose history underscores Lucia’s apprehensions in the first act wasn’t a fountain at all. Flashes of light momentarily illuminated three female figures during the overture, but the idea lacked the dramatic relevance of the ghost that traversed the set in Tomer Zvulun’s Seattle production—and indeed, that lack robbed the corresponding appearance of what was presumably Lucia’s ghost at the end of the opera of any discernible sense. Liberal use was made of scrims; but where, in Seattle, a similar resource created poetry and magic, here it seemed a merely routine way to delay our sight of what was behind.

Most damaging of all was the absence of any discernible dramatic involvement on the part of principals and chorus alike. To some degree, Michael Fabiano’s Edgardo may be exempted from that criticism, for he acted with considerable power, but even he toward the end was clearly in of some properly purposeful direction. Gregory Dahl, who made so impressive a Nick Shadow in Pacific Opera Victoria’s Rake’s Progress a year ago, was again vocally secure, but his Enrico reacted to his sister’s mental shipwreck with all the intensity of a man who has just been informed by the waiter that his table won’t be ready for another five minutes. And the behavior of the chorus members was both undramatic and incomprehensible. Where their counterparts in Seattle registered the unmistakable terror of ordinary party-goers faced with the unthinkable, the Vancouver choristers simply looked like a chorus dressed up for the occasion. Then, in the middle of the mad scene, they (and Raimondo) strolled casually offstage for no apparent reason at a moment when no witness of such a pitiable sight would have dreamed of leaving—and a few minutes later, compounding the absurdity, they all came trooping back again.

In sum, this was a production that showed director Amiel Gladstone bereft of any clear idea of how to draw convincing human responses from his forces on stage. Ms. Gutiérrez herself needed much more help in projecting the pathos of her madness. It was left almost exclusively to the excellent Fabiano to send us home with at least some measure of dramatic conviction and truth to look back on.

Bernard Jacobson

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