Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A generation ago, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was viewed primarily as the vehicle for a star soprano to show off her vocal fireworks. Now directors have turned the priorities upside down in their search for psychological motivation and social comment.Few dig as deep as Katie Mitchell, whose complex Royal Opera production divided opinion back in 2016. In short, Mitchell plays the opera like a film with split screens, one showing the story as we know it, the other filling in offstage events through the lens of male dominance in 19th-century society. Here is a Lucia who suffers a miscarriage and (pay attention amid the surfeit of action or you may miss it) dies by suicide. Donizetti would have been surprised by much of what he saw, but the opera has rarely felt more powerful.The production has been fortunate in its casts to date, and this revival ups the ante further. Not only do the lead singers commit themselves to Mitchell’s feminist reading of Walter Scott’s original story, they also sing their socks off.It is hard to imagine this vulnerable but feisty Lucia being played with more intensity than by Nadine Sierra, and her fearless singing of the role was all of a piece. From Lucia’s opening scene she goes for the gold medal in the soprano pentathlon — strength, speed, agility, stamina and a bravura display in the high jump (her high E flats, not written by Donizetti, may not be as mellow as those of Joan Sutherland, the Royal Opera’s legendary Lucia, but they are unmistakably, blazingly, tirelessly there). It is a virtuoso performance.So much of the electricity in the air is generated by Sierra that Xabier Anduaga’s Edgardo only needs to coast along in her wake. He may present a less individual personality, and there is a tendency to over-sing in a theatre of this size, but he offers a model of bel canto artistry, his tenor warm and expressive, his musicianship excellent. At 28, Anduaga is already known on the opera world’s top circuit, but for the Royal Opera he counts as a major find for the future. The young José Carreras comes to mind.This was a night for big singing. Artur Ruciński’s Enrico powers away on his top notes. Insung Sim and Andrés Presno, as Raimondo and Arturo, hold their own. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts with verve. It was like turning the clocks back. ★★★★★To May 18, roh.org.ukRenewal of the repertoire is also on the agenda at Wigmore Hall, albeit in a different way. The introduction of special days devoted to a contemporary composer has been a welcome, and imaginatively curated, step forwards.This weekend it was the turn of Australian composer Brett Dean. As a viola player, he has his own area of specialisation and the evening concert played around with six centuries of music that puts violas, or their earlier equivalents, centre stage. The climax came with Dean’s Approach (Prelude to a Canon), which sets up a duologue of increasing intensity between two violas (Lawrence Power and Dean himself) that hurtled directly, with help from members of the Nash Ensemble, into Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 6.The afternoon recital focused on two of Dean’s string quartets. In each, the music oscillates between headlong passages fraught with tension and eerie, static worlds, where illusions lurk. In the String Quartet No 2, And once I played Ophelia, the visions are the ones in Ophelia’s mind, voiced with uncanny, stratospheric precision by soprano Jennifer France. The String Quartet No 3, Hidden Agendas, explores the extremes of the current political climate in fearsomely concentrated movements like “Hubris”, “Self-censorship” and “On-Message”. The Doric Quartet were gripping in both. ★★★★☆wigmore-hall.org.uk
