Donizetti Lucia di Lammermoor (marco Armiliato, Anna Netrebko) (2009,2013)

Having dazzled opera audiences from St. Petersburg to L.A. as Lucia, Anna Netrebko triumphantly returns to the Metropolitan Opera in this touchstone coloratura role. Mariusz Kwiecien’s Enrico delivers theatrical truth with a matchless baritone, the lustre of polished mahagony.

This blu-ray release was originally broadcast live in HD from The Met on February 7, 2009. In addition to Netrebko’s spectacular performance, Mariusz Kwiecien’s Enrico delivers theatrical truth with a matchless baritone with the luster of polished mahogany. This Met performance of director Mary Zimmerman’s “imaginative staging…and nuanced portrayals” (Times) is a tour de force of music and theatricality. Having dazzled opera audiences from St. Petersburg to L.A. as Lucia, Anna Netrebko triumphantly returns to the Metropolitan Opera in this touchstone coloratura role!

Anna Moffo, as the young and vulnerable heroine Lucia, produces a wonderfully sincere, yet highly romantic performance in this classic recording of Donizetti's Lucia Di Lammermoor. Featuring Georges Prêtre conducting the RCA Italian Opera Chorus and Orchestra, the recording features a stellar cast of singers, including the incomparable Carlo Bergonzi, Mario Sereni, and Ezio Flagello.

Donizetti's great tragedy is his undisputed masterpiece of melancholic romanticism, with the doomed love between Lucia and Edgardo retold from Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor. The 1992 production heightens the story’s powerful libretto with its dramatic visual design and first class musical performances.

In July 1835 Donizetti was to have staged the first of the three new operas for which he had signed a contract with the management of the San Carlo theatre; but things, as so often happens in the world of opera, did not work out as the composer had intended. The subject - Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor - had long since been chosen but the direction had not provided for having the libretto written so that it could be read and approved by the censor by the beginning of March, four months before the scheduled date of the première, as the contract stipulated. At the end of May, at the composer’s urgent bidding, the writing of the libretto was entrusted to Salvatore Cammarano, destined to become one of the composer’s favourite working partners: yet the date of the première, inevitably, had to be postponed. After many problems, Lucia di Lammermoor was at last staged on the evening of 26th September 1835.

The Metropolitan Opera performance of Lucia Di Lammermoor features Joan Sutherland in a triumphant return to the Met after a four year absence. Dame Joan gives a performance of astounding facility and musical sensitivity. Gaetano Donizetti's tragic masterpiece is based on Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, a brooding tale of love, murder, and vengeance set in seventeenth-century Scotland. Taped live in its entirety on November 13, 1982.

Italian opera in Japan got started in the mid-1950s. The series title was Lirica Italiana, and back in the early days the international stars who appeared would have had to make at least six stops when flying out from Europe. Despite this exhausting journey the productions, mounted with the help of Japanese orchestras and choruses, were often legendary, and they are now being issued on DVD by the admirable American company Video Artists International.

In 1959 a young Australian soprano burst upon the international scene with a sensational performance of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. That soprano was Joan Sutherland, and now, 50 years later, Decca celebrates the prima donna in her most acclaimed role. Decca proudly presents, in a deluxe limited-edition, the soprano's 1971 landmark recording of Donizetti's opera. All the principal singers are here caught at the pinnacle of their careers, making this, quite possibly, the most beautiful Lucia ever captured on record.

Lucia di Lammermoor catapulted Joan Sutherland to international fame in 1959. It is a role with which her name is now inextricably linked and one which provides a perfect showcase for her remarkable vocal agility and acting ability. Set in the misty moors of Scotland, Lucia di Lammermoor is based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott. It is a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers separated by a family feud. In Gaetano Donizetti's dark, romantic opera, the forces of hate tear the young couple apart, leading to madness and murder. Richard Greager, Malcolm Donnelly, Joan Sutherland. Directed by John Copley, conducted by Richard Bonynge.