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Toward the end of a season in which I’ve devoted most of my attention to operas of the canon in repertory revivals, it’s been good to see an uptick on the performance thermometer of two Verdi operas, Il Trovatore and Luisa Miller. The scheduling of these works, especially in holdover productions, will never make news, and these days may get us a good scolding from the relevance scouts. But evenings like these are still the bread-and-butter experience—indeed the desired experience—of a large portion of the opera audience, and how far they rise above the grind-it-out level, season-in, season-out, is one determinant of a repertory institution’s survival prospects. It also happens that while the casting of both operas had some happy spots, the overall impression it conveyed of the state of big-opera vocality was sufficiently concordant with observations I’ve made throughout the year to give us grounds for some generalizations on that central topic.

Some of the improvement over the last efforts I’d seen with these pieces (in the same productions) was in the pit. In Il Trovatore (the performance of Jan. 30), the orchestra played with more consistent spark and alertness for Marco Armiliato than it had for Riccardo Frizza on the last go-round, or than it had earlier in this season for Carlo Rizzi in Norma or Emmanuel Villaume in Thaïs. There were several lacunae at points marked as fermatas over empty bars (i.e., dramatic pauses that didn’t hold), but since these all involved the Leonora, Jennifer Rowley, and she had stepped into the role when Maria Agresta cancelled the run, I decided to put them down to insufficient rehearsal and a soprano with a lot else on her mind. ^(I) Otherwise, while this Troubadour could at times have used more romantic shading, it at least chugged along with enough pep and precision to give basic satisfaction. It didn’t sound tired.

The Luisa, too (on April 18), had more orchestral presence, more thrust and parry, than Gianandrea Noseda had given it a few seasons back, and I was happy to thereby revise upward my estimation of Bertrand de Billy, whom I’d formerly heard live only in French operas (Carmen, sprightly and underfed;  Faust, somewhat better; but with Roméo, back to the Comique Syndrome). Luisa, with its superb, taut sinfonia and its intermittently inspired, easily derailed progression of scenes, needs a good pulling-together, and de Billy obliged. Thus, given the superb playing mechanics of the Met orchestra, both these works had sturdy repertory underpinnings.