My view of the stage differed from Ms Elleson's by about 28",  but with this tiny difference I would echo what she's said.  She has sage words about the musical side of things (on which I concur entirely), so I will stick to the production.

It's eminently sensible and top-rate work by David Alden - who has, you might say, "hit his mature period" with this work.  Gone are the sensational and shocking elements of his earlier shows, now replaced by an approach founded on the best of foundations - a careful and accurate reading of the text, and what the issues are within it.  The abusive brother/sister relationship is obviously at the heart of it,  but characters like the Iago-like "Normanno" are allowed to become three-dimensional characters, rather than the usual cardboard baddies.  The "mad scene" is handled excellently - it's slightly "stagey" elements are played to the fore by putting it onto a "stage within a stage", a cutaway to the bedroom in which Arturo has been viciously butchered.  Although there's rather more tomato ketchup than even Peter O'Toole's "Macbeth", the timing with which it's revealed is carefully handled to avoid the natural audience tendency to giggle nervously.  There is super, convincing, honest acting from all four principals, and a neatly symoblic ending which "says it all" without having to go into grim melodramatics.

The whole thing fits the category of "benchmark production", without avoiding some risk-taking that keeps you on the edge of your seat until the end.  Top value stuff, and highly recommended!!

I hope Paul Daniel calms down and learns to be a bit more generous as an accompanist than he was on the opening night, however - it's Bel Canto, not Berg

I've just got a ticket for 6 March online, and my machine is spending 20 minutes printing out the confirmation.

I don't want to know the production angle. Let it come as a lovely surprise.  I have every confidence it will be a far more competent concept than I got for Il Trovatore just north of the Danube.

It'll be the best money's-worth you might have for your cash, right now, Don B - they don't put a foot wrong  

I went last night.  Barry Banks sang Edgardo again as Dwayne Whatsit was indisposed.  So I did have the first night cast.

Sarah Pring in the thankless confidante role was luxury casting, I thougt.

Mark Stone was excellent as Enrico.  His duet with Lucia was full of barely repressed eroticism ending up with him lashing her to the bedpost, and feeling up her undies.

It reminded me of The Duchess of Malfi where a woman is persecuted by her brothers to maintain their status in a way expressing sadistic eroticism.

Pretty damn good.

The programme quoted a passage from the book, which I have read in the past.  How on earth did Scott become so popular when he wrote such turgid prose?

At a number of times the music made me think, "Gosh this is perky." (eg Cabaletta to Raimondo Lucia duet, Act 2, Scene 1)

In the light of both of these features it is no wonder the work is not taken too seriously, but Alden took it perfectly seriously without becoming irrelevantlly gimacky (bare in mind I still have the Bucharest Trovatore in my mind as an example of How Not To Do It.)

The mad scene was fine.  Lucia is discovered in exactly the same position as for her first aria.  She was the same infantile repressed figure as then, but now expressing herself in the only way open to her.

The end of the mad scene on a stage was fine - it indicated Lucia had retreated into a world of her own and reflected the C19 operatic conventions in which it was expressed.

Given some musicologist had discovered that Donizetti intended a glass harmonica rather than a flute for the obligatto, it was irresistible for the ENO to use one.  I had difficulty hearing it - I would just have soon had the flute.

My seat did not give me a clear view of the hero's death.  I heard a pistol shot toward the end of the cababletta and presumed he had done himself in.  Was the shot in fact fired by Enrico?  That would make more dramatic sense than the convention that the Tenor had to die because the final curtain is due to fall.  Mind you the music of the final scene is very brooding, and it would be quite appropriate for him just to fade away.

I was struck that the really passionate relationship was not Lucia and her lover, but Lucia and her brother.  Alden certainly brought that out - it is not in the plot, but maybe Lucia develops this morbid crush on a stranger who has rescued her from a charging bull, just to escape her brother's interest in her.  And certainly the music of her duet with her brother is more compelling than the rather drippy duet with her lover.

IMHO, Mark Stone had considerably more sex appeal vocally and physically than Barry Banks.

I'm going again tomorrow night in the hope of hearing Anna Christy and Mark Stone, both of whom were off sick the night I went. I do hope they're feeling better now. Either Banks or Jones would do me...Would quite like to hear Paul Whelan too.

I really liked the glass harmonica - fitted in with a general Grand Guignol tone of both production and musical performance I thought - but my other half managed to miss it despite the broad visual clue so perhaps it's true that it isn't loud enough for the auditorium.

Lurelle Alefounder and David Stephenson.

I thought Stephenson sang very well but (not surprisingly) didn't develop the character all that much. Alefounder gave a creditable performance considering that she was announced to be ill herself - it's not the role I'd go for if I was feeling under the weather.