Lucia di Lammermoor is one of the two or three Donizetti operas that have never fallen out of the repertoire, and the more of his operas it’s possible to see, or at least to hear on CD, the less explicable that becomes. The late and rightly venerated Rodney Milnes called Lucia ‘a blazing masterpiece’, but that does seem to be overdoing it, and in fact several of his other works are more worthy of that accolade.