Dessay in Lucia:How do you Top Daughter?

Natalie Dessay has long since established herself as a first-tier coloratura, but she had a career-defining hit last season with her performance opposite Juan Diego Flórez in Daughter of the Regiment at the Met—about the most cheerful and engaging big-stage performance that ever I’ve seen Still, nothing comes without a price. In San Francisco this month with Lucia di Lammermoor, she found herself in competition with herself.

That is: in Daughter, Dessay does one memorable entrance dragging a rope line of laundry. The scene and, indeed, the performance as a whole, established that Dessay knows how to give good comedy. In Lucia, she seems still to be dragging the rope line of comedy behind her. But Lucia is a much more spookily serious than Daughter—funny weird if anything, and definitely not funny ha ha. Dessay sang it wonderful and acted it well. Still for so much of the stage business, she didn’t seem to know quite what to do except plan it for laughs. This was particularly true in the first act, where she has to establish that she is half over-the-edge already, so we will accept her later percipitious collapse. Some of her caterwauling came perilously close to clowing.

This isn’t a complaint, exactly. Her mad scene, with blood fingerpaint-smears on her face, was leisurely, slow, fully realized, yet never seemed to strain for effect. It’s certainly one I’ll remember, and this is not trivial—comparing notes after the show, we agreed that we’ve seen others that we can’t really remember at all. And in general, you can just take it as evidence of how performers gain texture from their own history.

Dessay’s backup in Lucia was creditable, but a bit disappointing. As Edgardo, Giuseppe Filianoti offered a lovely voice, but he seems to be a soloist, not up to drama. In their first-act encounter, Dessay kept flailing desperately about for some kind of human interaction, while Filianoti continued with his private cabaret turn In he second half where he was truly on his own he was less constrained, but he still brought to mind the old rule (Stanislavski?) that too many actors think about what they can bring to the character, not what the character can bring to them. Gabriele Viviani as Lucia’s brother Raimondo, understood his character and sang well, but his voice didn’t really conquer the space of the War Memorial (throwaway comment: has anyone noticed how the plot here parallels Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure—sister doesn’t want to traffick her virtue but brother, for whatever reason, thinks trafficking would be a pretty good idea--?).

On the whole, then, a fine performance, worth a detour; not up to Daughter, but hey, what is? Taking her bow as the mad Lucia, Dessay pointed her bottom at the ceiling and folded her hands above (it works; you’d have to see it)—a cute piece of playful clowning, utterly unmotivated by anything in the production. What matches Daughter? Evidently Dessay isn’t so sure herself.