Her tones were well-placed and sung with an ease that made all the trills and runs appear easy. But then conductor Riccardo Muti has already engaged her. He was Miss Sutherland’s longtime conductor and music director. I wondered what Joan Sutherland’s husband Richard Bonynge might have said if he had witnessed Shagimuratova. The focus was on Donizetti’s luscious music and motifs conducted expressively by LA Opera’s music director James Conlon, and on the singers who would have made Donizetti proud. I was in heaven because to me, I was finally going to the opera, not to a production where the singers were only dessert. This LA Opera “Lucia” was simply marvelous. Although the somewhat stark set with projections on the back walls might have benefited with a more traditional set, or any set for that matter, the modernistic frames and expressive lighting, minus an ostentatious, elaborate stage, allowed us to hear the singers and watch them. The opening performance of Los Angeles Opera’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” enabled us to really listen. It is such a joy to go to the opera and really focus on the singers. Well, there is a new star on our horizon: coloratura soprano Albina Shagimuratova. But Joan Sutherland was my Lucia in the 1960s and ’70s.

Naturally there was Nellie Melba, Tetrazzini, Galli-Curci, Lily Pons, then Sills and a more full-voiced Maria Callas. In my mind, she was the quintessential Lucia, and I wondered if there would ever be another one like her. She didn’t sing like most typical coloratura sopranos with a somewhat thin and often squeaky voice to reach the higher register with a coloratura flourish - she sang those flowing runs and mellifluous arpeggios with a substantial soprano sound. Studying voice at the time, my father and teacher always told me that Sutherland was unique. A few of the selections were from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and I loved them. When I was about eighteen, I often listened to one audiotape sung by Joan Sutherland. Saimir Pirgu (Edgardo) and Albina Shagimuratova (Lucia).

Lucia di lammermoor met opera review