St. Louis.(Lucia di Lammermoor)

Blue-ribbon winner in Opera Theatre of Saint Louis's twenty-seventh season was the company's first Lucia di Lammermoor, given a strikingly imaginative production by Stefano Vizioli and conducted with barn-burner passion by Stephen Lord, OTSI's music director. Performed in English (as are all OTSL's productions), this Lucia was no standard-issue costume drama; Vizioli placed Donizetti's Scots family feud in a neatly stylized late-nineteenth-century landscape, designed by Allen Moyer, that allowed the drama to unfold with the clarity, wit and urgency of a contemporary thriller. Jennifer Welch-Babidge, the production's forceful Lucy Ashton, made a striking Act I entrance dressed in snug, high-collared black velvet, her back stiff and her head held high, looking more repressed spinster aristocrat than giddy ingenue as she paced into the chalky-white graveyard where the haunted fountain was placed. Welch-Babidge delivered the fountain aria itself with intelligence and poignance but left an equivocal impression vocally; she sounded less than comfortable with Lucy's coloratura gear shifts in the aria proper, visibly relaxing into the more lyric music of the duet with her attractive, sympathetic Edgar, Shawn Mathey. But the soprano made her points later, in spades, in a gutsy confrontation with Henry Ashton (limned with splendidly red-blooded swagger by James Westman) that for once established the Ashton siblings as equals in temperament, if not in temporal power, and in her blazing assault on the mad scene, defiantly trailing a voluminous wedding veil behind her as she wafted into the marriage celebration. The chorus was in noble form throughout the evening, and the bold, positive force of Lord's conducting and the elegant sweep of Vizioli's staging kept the drama crackling in every scene, even (mirabile dictu!) the Wolf's Crag confrontation, so often an undervalued anticlimax in this opera. This may have been the opera's first outing at OTSL, but it proved admirably suited to the company's resources; it's been a long time since I've heard a Lucia this exciting in New York (or anywhere else, for that matter).

OTSL artistic director Colin Graham directed the company premiere of Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet, in his own English-language translation of the Carre and Barbier libretto. OTSL's Hamlet eschewed the opera's original quasi-happy denouement (in which Hamlet is crowned king after killing Claudius) in favor of the ending of the piece created for early British performances, in which Hamlet dies with Ophelia in his arms. Much of Graham's staging had his familiar acuity and class--the closet scene between Hamlet and his mother was expertly calibrated, as were Ophelia's mad scene and death, lit in waves of shimmering green to suggest the river's waters--but the music's drama, not ...