IN his travels through the world of opera-in-concert-performance, Sir Charles Mackerras arrived last night at Lucia De Lammermoor, a splendid choice for the joint celebration of Donizetti's two-hundredth birthday and the Festival's fiftieth.

Though it might have been an occasion for a brilliant new staging such as Graham Vick's at Florence, a powerful study of a woman victimised by indomit-able Scottish masculinity, Sir Charles's revelations were no less compelling. As usual these involved a complete clean-up of the music, resulting in incisive new instrumental tambres, and in bold new distinctions between the heights of Lucia's voice and the depths of the men's - essentially what Vick's production, too, was telling us, but here approached by a different route.

Nobody on hearing it could have doubted that Donizetti's opera is a masterpiece, not just some ramshackle outpouring of Italian bel canto. The tension of Sir Charles's conducting created a constant tightening of the screw, but that was what was built into Donizetti's music anyway, through orchestral writing as finely detailed as Berlioz's - horns, harp, and percussion were all heard to telling effect - and vocal lines invariably at the services of the drama.

But this was also a jolly good performance, pungently colour-ed, strongly paced, with a fierce, dark lustre that seemed exactly right. Andrea Rost's Hungarian Lucia, her mad scene marvellously sustained, is going to be something to look out for in every theatre. Bruce Ford's sweet, yet keenly articulated, Edgardo, Alastair Miles's sonorous Raimondo Bidebent, and Anthony Michaels-Moore's intense Enrico Ashton provided a gallery of male portraits which, even in concert performance, were greatly impressive.