The air was electric. Would Seville beat Espanyol on penalties, or would Edgardo join Lucia in heaven first, after his own penalty shoot-out? Half the audience of Scottish Opera’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor – the first in 26 years – seemed more concerned with the result of the Uefa Cup final than with the fate of the Bride of Lammermoor.

John Doyle, directing, was certainly up against stiff competition. But when Alan Fairs as a most eloquent Raimondo announced the death of Lucia, and when Edgardo paid the penalty for his love by stabbing himself to death, there was a rapt silence in the house, broken only by cheers at the curtain-calls as loud as any at the stadium down the road.

This sombre, painfully truthful production, perceptively and energetically conducted by Julian Smith, has certainly been worth waiting for. Liz Ascroft’s single set of dark pillars, steps and billowing cloudscapes (painstakingly moonlit by Wayne Dowdeswell) is dominated by the shadowy presence of cloaked men with menacing long sticks and by solemn processions of candle-bearing women. They seem to be clone-like projections of the long-haired sacrificial victim that is this Lucia.

All is black, save the crimson of Lucia’s cloak and the scarlet of her long, blood-drenched bridal train/ winding sheet. It vanishes like a wraith behind her at the end of Act II, and reappears at exactly the same spot as she enters, deranged, in Act III.

The power of Doyle’s production is in such moments, and in the still, spare groupings and body language with which he matches (and sometimes counterpoints) the emotional life of Donizetti’s score. Until the minutely studied gestures of her Mad Scene, daringly tuned to the twists and turns of the bel canto line, the strength of Sally Silver ( pictured) is in her stillness: everything is focused within her magnificently variegated and tireless soprano. The Turkish tenor Bülent Bezdüz, at once lithe and lacerating, is very much her equal. And both Andrew Schroeder’s Enrico and Adriano Graziano’s Arturo make a musically strong mark.

Doyle fascinatingly plays off Nicholas Ransley’s Normanno with Sarah Pring’s formidable Alisa as complementary and omnipresent eavesdropping presences. The one is cynically detached, the other achingly sympathetic – and both are totally impotent in the face of the tragedy that unfolds so compellingly in front of them and us.

— In Glasgow May 19, 22, 26, 31 (0870 0606647), then touring: scottishopera.org.uk

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