Lucia di Lammermoor

Published Monday 25 February 2008 at 12:55 by George Hall

ENO’s former music director Paul Daniel returns to conduct David Alden’s first-ever production of Donizetti’s tragic masterpiece.

Sensitive and stirring music-making ensure that the alternately melancholy and violent emotions of the score are given full value, something matched equally in the staging.

In the title role, Anna Christy’s light soprano may not offer a range of colour but she has all the notes and her presentation of Lucia as a victimised child is harrowing. Arguably the sexual abuse she suffers at the hands of her brother Enrico - powerfully sung and acted by Mark Stone - is a step too far, and unsupported by the text.

Partnering her as her illicit lover Edgardo is Barry Banks, a bitter, furious presence with empowered vocalism to match.

On the first night Clive Bayley’s Raimondo had succumbed to bronchitis; his creepy chaplain leered from the stage while Paul Whelan sang the role, magnificently. Another of Alden’s goings-too-far involves turning the luckless Arturo - another of the opera’s victim figures - into an effete and preening interloper. Dwayne Jones realises this effectively nevertheless.

Dramatically, the opera’s steadily rising trajectory falters at the halfway point of the mad scene and the final scene is undisciplined. Still, Charles Edwards’ stressed Victorian interiors describe the financial and spiritual decay that lie at the heart of the tragedy, and there’s enough insight as well as impetus in Alden’s direction to ensure that the drama hits home with considerable force, the odd excess notwithstanding.