Bellini said that music drama must make audiences cry, terrify them out of their minds and then kill them. His wonderful exhortation should fit Donizetti’s Lucia like a glove. But it doesn’t at all in DG’s new take-over of a matinee telecast from New York in February 2009. There’s a handsome-looking and (mostly) -sounding cast who – as far as they are permitted here – can act. The conductor is fine and the orchestra play well for him in a not too 21st-century manner. Yet the end result rarely transcends a clean and efficient run-through of a stage production which gently updates the costumes from 16th- to 19th-century Scotland, while providing scenery and action that could work in either.

Things begin almost too well with Natalie Dessay – actually this production’s first Lucia – as presenter and interval interviewer. Dessay’s intelligence, quizzical smile and Inspector Clouseau English make riveting TV of backstage star-gazing, statistics and scene-shifting. Onstage, Anna Netrebko, appearing not too long after the birth of her first child, is not in easiest voice. The bottom and a pinging top are fine, as is her surely improved handling of the Italian language, but rather a lot of bits in between (including necessarily nimble passagework) are less so. She only fires up in tandem with Mariusz Kwiecien’s suavely evil rendering of her brother Enrico. Their “Il pallor funesto, orrendo” confrontation about the fixed wedding, and Lucia’s sudden attack with a dagger at the end of the Mad Scene, approach a level of surely necessary hysteria missing from the ordered Victorian calm of Mary Zimmerman’s staging.

Elsewhere Piotr Beczala stands in as Edgardo for Rolando Villazón with much vocal but little dramatic achievement, Michaela Martens works hard as Alisa and we get almost all of the Wolf’s Crag scene, unatmospherically designed. The ghost of the stabbed girl that Lucia claims to have seen by the fountain actually appears and (sorry for the spoiler) Netrebko/Lucia becomes that ghost at the end for Edgardo’s suicide. The camerawork makes deft use of low-level close-ups and high-angle shots. But this remains a disappointing DVD because the performance is simply not exciting or special enough for repeated home viewing.