Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Lucia di Lammermooris an opera about a woman whose sense of herself splinters into shards.
We watch herself watching herself, a process that cant end well.
Shes not alone in this virtual infinity mirror.
By the end, the camera has become a mind reader.
But this is a production that never passes up an opportunity to overexplain.
Eventually, they cluster together, fragments of a civilization at loose ends.
Nadine Sierra looks and sounds as if shes been singing the title role her whole life.
Shes an avatar of doomed defiance.
Its not easy to negotiate the disjunction between opera speed and Hollywood pacing.
It doesnt jibe well with an aesthetic of quick cuts and shifting perspectives.
Stone deals with the problem by having the sets go slowly spinning in overlapping orbits.
At first, all this activity is fun; eventually, it grows tiresome.
Then Lucia does the same (because shes crazy) and so does Edgardo (hes sad).
In the second act, the production threatens to go off the rails.
(The cake, of course, winds up on someones face.)
Fortunately, conductor Riccardo Frizza and the cast rescue the staging from total confusion.
The singers are game for Stones antics, but not at the expense of the music.
Theres no compromise with concept here.
Donizetti wrote music of extraordinary beauty, and Camarena delivers it with its loveliness intact.
Its not an easy balance; too much exquisiteness can make her unraveling hard to buy.
Lucia di Lammermooris at the Metropolitan Opera through May 21.
