How very odd - why is there such a dearth of decent coloraturas in Britain, I wonder?  Aren't the teachers available to bring-on the right singers?   They're fivepence a bucket here, and all of them excellent.  I just auditioned an excellent one today (from St P, at the request of her agent, even though we have nothing for her upcoming) and by coincidence she did the LUCIA Act One aria...  magnificently, with all the "Sutherland" ornaments.  Sadly I already have two excellent coloraturas to choose from

What's needed for LUCIA, I think, isn't that "pipsqueak" kind of coloratura who does Queen Of The Night, Olympia, Zerbinetta or Air Traffic Control...  you need a bit more welly, someone who maybe also sings TROVATORE (as indeed my auditionee today has also done)?

Surely Anna Christie wasn't a pipsqueak, but she was very little girlish - indeed that was the whole point of the production, dressing her at her first entrance as Alice in Wonderland, and the coloratura suggesting a dreamy lack of contact with reality, which eventually gets the better of her.

I have seen Sutherland in the part in my time...

Hmmmmm,  not so sure about that!!

I think the tragedy of it is that Tatiana Larina very much knows her own mind, and that Onegin is the right one for her - she's wise beyond her years.   It's Onegin who's the berk with pretensions to being a French aesthete, and he's so obsessed with being seen to be "fashionable" in front of his posh friends that he turns-down a proposal from a girl who's talented, courageous and stunning. What a drongo Onegin is!  It's like turning down a proposal from Claudia Schiffer because your mate's got a Swedish girlfriend, so you ought to have one too (   Shooting her sister's fiance is hardly good manners either, of course...

I know I've quoted this so many times that people are sick of it, but it bears repetition here, I feel...

"The moment you feel you have to explain what you have done in a programme-note, you have failed.  The more extensive the programme-note, the greater is your failure.  If you cannot convey your message with all the resources of a professional cast and a modern well-equipped theatre,  either your message is wrong, or you have not worked hard enough"
Peter Brook, "The Empty Space".

My own feeling is that the duty of an opera director is to stage what's in the opera.  It doesn't matter that contemporary historians might have unveiled hidden depths to Mazeppa's character and motives, and that Orlik was in fact a Prince of the highest moral character.  In the opera they're portrayed by the composer who chose a libretto that depicts them in a particular way, and you have no right as a producer to try to reverse that.  Tchaikovsky's chosen libretto has picked the scenes of Onegin that are crucial to his own interpretation of the story, and I think one's obliged to go along with that - or find a new composer and write your own opera as a gloss on Tchaikovsky's, if you hate his version so much?   

I hope the ROH manage to leave some of Tchaikovsky's opera intact for you, Harpy!

So have I, and the sight of a six-foot sexuagenerian Sheila charging around the stage in a blood-stained nightie is not a sight one one forgets in a hurry. On the other hand, the other young lover that night was Bergonzi, whose concept of acting involved extending the occasional arm ... but the singing was (from both) was incomparable, and I expect to spend my rapidly-approaching dotage telling the opera-loving grandchildren (some hope) about this one. 

I was in the Upper Slips at the ROH that night, and as the house rose to acclaim Sutherland's mad scene, the little old lady standing next to me turned to me, and in a heavy central-European accent hissed:  "Ve are now vitnessing ... mass hysteria".  And perhaps it was, but deserved nonetheless. 

Not to mention the dreadful choral ensemble and the bawling baritone in the opening scene ...

Very disappointing.  I turned it off too.