Yonghoon Lee was the Manrico. I had not heard him since a Don Carlo in 2010. His tenor has strengthened in the interim, and while some of this has been achieved by darkening vowels below the passaggio, unlike so many contemporary tenors he has at least retained steadiness and clarity of tone, and the upper range, though it cannot expand excitingly atop such a structure, is clean and reliable. His presence has dignity, and I found his responses to Azucena’s Act 2 narrative compelling.

Luisa Miller gave me the chance to enter an evaluation of Sonia Yoncheva beyond the sketchy treatment I found room for in my reports on last year’s La Traviata (see the posts of Aug. 3 and 17, 2017). While Luisa’s lovely and, at moments, touching music does not reach the emotional depth of Violetta’s, Yoncheva conveyed much of the same expressive directness and vulnerability, the good instinct for Verdian style, and the bloom of timbre that had made her appealing in Traviata. Luisa is of sensible weight for the technical arrangement of her voice (as Tosca, which she had been undertaking, isn’t), and I detected difficulty for her only in the rangey, dynamically tricky, and (by definition) exposed writing of the Act 2 unaccompanied quartet, “Come celar le smanie,” wherein she skated over the music and recovered her intonational center only when she let the voice out for the runs up to the sustained fortissimo high Bs. Otherwise, she sailed through the role’s main opportunities (the charming Act 1 ensemble with solos, “T’amo d’amor ch’esprimere“; the heart-catching “Tu puniscimi, o Signore” in Act 2; the duet with Miller and the climactic scene with Rodolfo in Act 3) with little impediment. For more on what I mean by “technical arrangement,” see the broader discussion below.

That’s where some of the assessment of Piotr Beczala’s Rodolfo belongs, too—in the context of current tenorizing in general. But to describe his singing on this occasion: in the lower register his voice has a grainy texture, certainly not unpleasant and under good control. He sustains a good, though rather unvaried, legato line. As his tone builds up toward the passaggio it takes on some heft, from which one can imagine it opening up into a large, heady upper range. That doesn’t happen, though. Instead, it closes into a more held posture—secure and technically consistent, so that he sings without mishaps—but not freely ringing.  (I was put in mind of the early transition of Rudolf Schock from a free-flowing lyric tenor to a reliable but constricted Jugendlich.) The sturdiness and consistency are enough to place Beczala among our better tenors, while leaving him short of a thrilling, poetic Rodolfo.

At the time of my ticket purchase, I had made an end run around the dates on which the role of Miller, Luisa’s father, was being taken by Plácido Domingo. This wasn’t out of any lack of admiration for Domingo’s remarkable career extension, but simply from the wish to hear a typical baritone role sung by a typical baritone, in this case one I hadn’t yet heard, Luca Salsi.^(I) Miller is a quite representative Verdi baritone part of the higher sort, its tessitura more akin to that of Di Luna or the Ernani Carlo than to that of Boccanegra or Iago. Its establishing aria, “Sacra la scelta,” with its cabaletta, “Ah, fu giusto”  (even without the latter’s interpolated concluding A-flat), hangs notably high, with modest flourishes demanding flexibility on the upper edge of the passaggio, rather in the manner of the Forza Carlo’s “Urna fatale.” This might seem ideal for a lowered tenor, it’s really exactly the problem. Even laying aside the issue of contrasting timbres (Rodolfo and Miller sounding too much alike), a tenor with good registral balance (and Domingo is that) will pass with much too much ease over such phrases, and we lose the sense of emphasis and potency that is conveyed by a voice of baritonal weight surmounting the demands. Sure enough, Salsi’s turned out to be a mellow-sounding baritone of quite fluent technique, warm but not granitic or brilliant, well suited to such roles as Silvio, Malatesta, or Marcello, passing with much too much ease through the double aria and so establishing Miller as a pleasant, easygoing gentleman, not a stubborn, high-principled, old-soldier counterforce. I do wonder if Domingo took that A-flat.