Stellar team stages exciting new 'Lucia' at the Met

The Metropolitan Opera's season opening is usually glamorous, sometimes artistically significant, but often too ritualized to be fun. Leave it to the new Peter Gelb administration, however, to create a genuine occasion on Monday with a new production of

Lucia di Lammermoor

featuring soprano Natalie Dessay directed by Chicago theater wizard Mary Zimmerman - with delicious rumors of backstage conflict between them.

Onstage, the package was a success on most fronts, with the kind of spontaneous events that unify audiences. Dessay was in the midst of an intricate aria when she slipped on the raked stage with a pratfall worthy of Jerry Lewis - after which her performance was even more alert. And in her final-curtain bows, she waved from the outdoor balcony to hundreds of patrons who had watched her on the Lincoln Center plaza video screen.

The best part for visiting Philadelphians, though, was when tenor Stephen Costello (locally born and trained) arrived for Lucia's arranged Act II marriage. In his Met debut, he looked wooden - but outside the confines of the Academy of Vocal Arts' acoustically odd theater on Spruce Street, his tenor voice unfurled as though it had found its true home. He'll switch to the leading role of Edgardo Oct. 25.

Much of Donizetti's music is maddeningly conventional, with desperately uninteresting harmonies, though you might not hear that with James Levine conducting; what normally sounds trivial did not. In more crucial scenes, Levine created well-charged energy fields like an emotional scenic designer.

Not that scenic apologies were needed elsewhere. Though Zimmerman made her name on ingenious, low-budget stagings of mythological subjects, she and designer Daniel Ostling accommodated the Met's need for visual lushness. The gothic story of Lucia, tormented into insanity by marriage pressures, unfolded in moody, Scottish twilight where ghosts wandered the landscape and against full moons that grew to monstrous size. In a coup de theatre, the family's derelict, late-Victorian mansion was dominated by a dramatically grounded chandelier that ascended for tragedy-steeped celebration. The dramatically static Act II sextet smartly unfolded during a posed wedding-party photo.

The production's dramatic specificity accentuated the intractable circumstances between Lucia's brother, desperate for a family-saving marriage (marvelously sung and acted by Mariusz Kwiecien), and love-obsessed Edgardo (compellingly sung by brawny-voiced Marcello Giordani in the style of Puccini).

Dessay risked haphazard vocalism to give her vocal fireworks psychological underpinning. Her mad scene had some bugged eyes, but mainly just played emotions of the text, with a bloodcurdling scream and the shredding of her bloody veil as appreciated bonuses. Her overall level of invention was far higher than in La sonnambula a few years ago in Santa Fe, N.M. Pals or not, Dessay and Zimmerman should collaborate often.