At the Bucharest Opera Festival, regional companies face the challenge of adapting a production for a stage which may be two or even three times larger than their home theatre. More shrewdly than their colleagues in other houses, the principals for this compelling Lucia di Lammermoor from the Galați Opera took every opportunity to come downstage from the drop-in set, though the lighting did not always follow them.
In the title role, Lorena Mărginean lacked a palette of bel canto colours, and a fully developed chest register. Instead, she made a virtue of tonal purity by projecting Lucia as an authentically vulnerable teenager. Anachronistically speaking, both social services and Dr Freud would be straight on her case from her first entrance, dolly clutched in hand.
Set squarely in the Gothic imagination of Walter Scott, however, Paolo Bosisio’s production does not strain for contemporary relevance, and thereby achieves it all the more powerfully. With conductor Andreas Schein alert to every erratic flight of coloratura fancy, Mărginean’s Mad Scene felt precisely pitched between the sex and power fantasies of the men around Lucia – a proto-Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann – and the consciousness of womanhood dawning too late within her.
This Lucia was my third experience of the company from Galați, after La bohème at last year’s anniversary focus on Puccini in Bucharest, and then Madama Butterfly in their home city. The consistently Italianate style and confidence of the principal singers should be the envy of many larger houses, both in Romania and abroad. In the pit, the Galați orchestra gained confidence after a wobbly start: the brass were taxed throughout by the chorale which becomes a musical leitmotif prefiguring Lucia’s fate.
The staging’s gravest deficiency was that there wasn’t enough of it. Savage cuts deprived us of the Act 2 storm, the entire Wolf’s Crag scene to open Act 3 and more besides, apparently at the behest of the production’s conductor at its premiere a fortnight ago, Victor Dumănescu. Excluding intervals, Lucia’s fate was sealed within an hour and 45 minutes. What we gained in a punchy narrative of shocking tableaux, we more than lost from a cumulative grasp of the male characters as they gradually try, and mostly fail, to relate to Lucia.
Overcoming with vocal personality what they lacked in material, Mădălina Munteanu as Alisa and Tudorel State as Normanno presented in incisive sketches what could have been fully rounded portrayals. As Lucia’s short-lived spouse Arturo, Adrian Mărginean contributed to a dynamically shaded sextet, much more musically subtle than the attendant dramaturgy. The grateful warmth and noble phrasing of Sebastian Bancila’s Raimondo also suffered from the red pen.
More or less discreet amplification gave the 30-strong chorus a boost from their station at the back of the set, leading to some rapid knob-twiddling once they were joined in Act 3 by Paul Lungu’s Edgardo. In a pleasing piece of nominative determinism, Lungu could probably have made his presence felt from the Gara de Nord a mile away. His liquid lines and flying top register in his graveside aria rekindled happy memories of Rodolfo from a year ago: an old-school tenor with old-school presence and stamina. As Lucia's brother and Edgardo’s nemesis Enrico, Alin Munteanu adds tenorial strength to a baritone with ample grip, not least thanks to unfailingly exact diction (a common strength of the Galați company). Such vocal strength in depth was the outstanding quality of this trolley dash through Lucia, but it left me wanting more.
