This piece was for years accorded its place under the bus by the simple expedient of ending it with the first statement of A and its choral response. That’s how we find it on Met broadcasts of the ’30s and ’40s, with comprimario basses thrown into the breach. Now its structure is restored, and a French artist of some note given the assignment (Laurent Naouri, familiar from recordings of French Baroque operas, where he makes a good impression), but it still winds up below the conveyance, via directorial additions and conductorial subtractions. The director is Bartlett Sher, a highly Broadway-ized American faux-realist, coping here with the French Romantic aesthetic and formal operatic structures, and doing his utmost to bend them to his native understanding. His Capulet is an amiable ditherer, rushed around the stage by members of the chorus while Noseda pushes through at an overly fast tempo that allows for no nuance, no marking of the episodes, no moment for the voice to establish itself as more than a Sir Joseph Porter who has drifted across the Channel. In Act IV, Naouri showed a voice that, while lean and by no means commanding in this house, might well have registered some dimension, some personality, if allowed interpretive leeway. Too late to give Capulet his agency–“Allons, jeune gens” was tossed away.

The Capulets and guests clear, leaving the stage to the intruding, disguised Montagues. After the brief scene that establishes Mercutio’s bravado, Roméo’s restraint, and the latter’s disclosure of a clearly affecting dream, we’re at the delicious Ballad of Queen Mab. This is another solo in quick tempo, marked with a few bars of ritardando and nothing at all by way of dynamics in the voice part. (Admittedly, I’m working from a Schirmer piano/vocal score—not the most scholarly source.) Like Capulet’s air, it is the character’s only chance to create a place in the drama before more portentous doings later. Certainly the song must be sung with lightness of touch; the only question is whether one does so with or without an adequate voice. In this instance the role was given to Elliot Madore, a young singer of macho physical presence ^(I)but a vocal endowment barely above the pleasant pop-baritone level. He dispatched the piece fluently and to practically no purpose. As with the opening chorus and Naouri’s “Allons, jeune gens,” Noseda kept the whiskbroom whisking, barely indicating the marked ritards and finding no way to help the soloist find some vocal expansion or variance of color. This was reminiscent not only of the noneffect created by De Billy with Stéphane Degout in the Aughts of the present century, but of Luigi Mancinelli with a baritone named Winogradow in June of 1889, at least according to George Bernard Shaw. And I’ll let GBS do the lifting for me here:

“Signor Mancinelli misjudged one or two movements so widely that I strongly suspect him of a conscientious attempt to follow the composer’s metronome marks: the surest way, need I add, of violating the composer’s intentions. In a theatre of reasonable size, a very skillful singer, daintily accompanied, could no doubt point all the vagaries of Queen Mab as rapidly as poor M. Winogradow was haled through them on Monday; but, under the circumstances, the result was that the song missed fire.” The only difference we need note from Queen Mab in 1889 and Queen Mab in 2017 is that Mr. Winogradow, Shaw tells us, sang with unremitting loudness and intensity.