Online discographies (including off-air material) list no fewer than 11 Lucia recordings by Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge from the years 1966‑88, including the complete, and for some still benchmark, Decca set of 1971 with Pavarotti’s Edgardo, Milnes’s Enrico and Ghiaurov’s Raimondo, and the original made-for-TV 1986 film version of the present performance. For emotional and historical reasons alone it is an obvious choice for early release in Opera Australia’s new series. But, as John Steane pointed out in a review of the original video release (4/93), the soprano was then in her 60th year and “gives a performance marvellous for a woman of any age but only in certain passages. The voice, as recorded and reproduced, has acquired a beat, an unevenness on held notes, that renders it something essentially different from what it was in her prime.”

The performance, quite heavily cut, is enthusiastically projected by Bonynge and the orchestra. The well-remembered Clifford Grant and Malcolm Donnelly set to with a will and Richard Greager puts much bite into the hapless Edgardo. The sound is no better than its vintage but those who want an aural memoir of Sutherland on the wing would do better with performances from earlier dates, not forgetting Covent Garden’s belated official release of her 1959 debut performance.

The new recording from the Mariinsky brings us into another world. Following Gergiev’s and the label’s habitual mix, the cast imports Natalie Dessay’s tortured and youthful-sounding Lucia and Piotr Beczala’s doomed Edgardo into a more home-grown ensemble. Valery Gergiev’s Verdi has caused controversy in the past, so how authentic a Donizettian can he be? The basic answer is that the tinta he establishes for the work – a dark sound with good forward winds and present brass (the opposite of the smooth, over-romanticised sound favoured for this music in the first days of LP recording) – creates real atmosphere. Compared, say, with Bonynge’s view, this is a neurotic, depressed Donizetti, surely right for this story. If this is not always Italian slancio, it certainly has its own mood and lift, a way of making a more authentic 1830s-sounding experience of Donizetti’s score than the heartier Australian performance. It is also sensitive to dynamic markings: this is rarely a loud experience. And on a further question of authenticity, Gergiev relishes the glass harmonica sound in the Mad scene.

It’s hard to make a general recommendation for Lucia these days. Callas and Sutherland fans know where to go; those who are more fans of Donizetti and the opera as one of the great bel canto dramas, and a sound world that doesn’t sound like Verdi with the brakes on, should hear Mackerras’s Hanover Band, and, now, Dessay’s intelligently thought-out heroine, well captured in this new Russian set.