A new Bay Area opera company opened its inaugural season this past weekend, with four performances of Lucia di Lammermoor, one of the pinnacles of bel canto composition. The location for the performances, which continue this weekend, is the Elks Ballroom in Alameda, which will also house the company’s production of a double bill of Puccini’s Il Tabarro and Rossini’s Il Signor Bruschino this coming March.
Many of those involved with Island City Opera Company have previously performed in operatic productions with Alameda’s Virago Theater Company, which produced last season’s Il Trovatore, with Robert Ashens conducting. (Maestro Ashens will be at the podium for the Donizetti.) Executive Director Eileen Meredith, who sang that Trovatore’s Leonora, and wears at least two hats with the new company, will sing the role of Lucia.
The team assembled to create this production includes another name that will be familiar to Bay Area operagoers. Director Olivia Stapp had a luminous career as a dramatic soprano, including performances at San Francisco Opera and other major houses around the world, before taking the helm of Walnut Creek’s Festival Opera for many years. “The tension never lets up, and each scene is constructed for maximum dramatic and musical effect,” she says of Lucia. “The opera drives forward relentlessly, pressing on toward the undoing of the two lovers, who are ultimately destroyed by the hatred and ambitions of those around them,” Stapp says, adding, “they are engulfed by tribalism and violence endemic to their time and place.”
At almost 20 minutes in length, Lucia’s mad scene makes extraordinary demands on a singer. As previous singers from Melba to Callas have done, Meredith will select ornamentation for the famous melody that suits her voice, and this production will include, as customary, the duet of voice and flute, which brings the listener into such intimate contact with the faltering mind of Lucia.
But other singers will have a chance to share Lucia’s limelight. “One cannot overlook the other roles in the opera. Each is a demanding vocal tour de force,” says Stapp. In order to highlight the great acting talent of baritone Giorgio Ronconi, who originated the role of Enrico Ashton, Donizetti offered some of the work’s most beautiful music to that character, which will be sung in this production by Branislav Radakovic, who was heard recently by Bay Area audiences in West Edge Opera’s concert revival of Donizetti's Caterina Cornaro.
Donizetti broke with convention again when he ended the opera not with Lucia but with the death scene of the tenor hero, Edgardo, sung in this production by Alexander Boyer, a former participant in San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, and former Resident Artist with Opera San Jose.
For this inaugural season, Meredith defines success as “full houses and good reviews from people who are moved by the experience.” She also hopes, of course, that audiences will consider supporting the organization in a way that will allow the company to grow and be sustained the way its parent company, Virago, has done.
It is said that, at Lucia's premiere in Naples in 1835, members of the audience could be heard weeping openly. With a determined and creative team assembled, and a stated mission to go beyond full productions to include community events as well as school outreach and classes, we have reason to hope that the future of Island City Opera will be a much more cheerful story.