A sign of the times, surely, when even a critic of my proclivities, among which a strong belief in the centrality of singingacting is paramount, so frequently winds up giving pride of place to either the production or the conducting of an opera. It ain’t nachrul. But here we are. This is a cast of good musicians working hard to fulfill their conductor/dramaturg/conceptualizer’s myriad ideas and to fit into, not stand out from, the soundworld established by his orchestra. There is among them no memorable voice or outstanding personality, in a work that calls for several of each. They do a fair amount of ornamentation, and except for a few poorly conceived, unattractively executed upper-range excursions for the women, most of it makes sense. It doesn’t make much effect, though, because the voices doing the ornaments are insufficiently prismatic to make them tell. The singers resort to straight, white tone for excruciating stretches—a stylistic option, clearly, and a terrible one, since it almost never has even the token sort of dramatic reason (someone’s fainting, or presenting affectlessness), but merely the questionable historico-aesthetic one of matching the orchestra’s vibrato habits— and most of them demonstrate they don’t have to do that.

The men come off better than the women, who peck and coo at the music, and suffer the most from the supposedly stylish bleaching of tone. One of my notes reads, “To this point [‘Or sai chi l’onore’], not a single sustained, firm tone from any female.” Karina Gauvin, the Elvira, comes closest to fulfilling her role, though obliged to whisper and expectorate her way through her expressions of indignation. The most successful principal is the Leporello, Vito Priante. With a warm, medium-calibre baritone in good technical balance, he “reads” the role with a pointed declamatory sense that never sounds applied, and a wealth of nice nuance that keeps us following smilingly along. Kenneth Tarver’s clear lyric tenor renders Ottavio well (a particularly admirable “Il mio tesoro“), except when he falls into passive straightness in recitative. Mika Kares sings a solid Commendatore. (He uses the straightness to effect in the graveyard scene—but it’s an “on-the-voice” straightness, not just a retreat from engagement.) Guido Loconsolo is an unobjectionable Masetto, though Currentzis pushes him so hard through “Ho capito” that it would take the most ingenious of character baritones to register anything much.

So: we have one bass, as the Commandant, and two baritones of less than dramatic format in the other roles designated as bass. How are we to cast the Don, the one role designated as baritone? ^(I) In the Met ’42 performance, Pinza’s basso cantante was in fact more baritonish, more lyrical, than those of his Leporello (Kipnis) or Commendatore (Cordon). But in Currentzis’ company, Pinza (or immediate successors like Siepi or—for a baritone alternate, George London—would turn the pairing with Leporello upside-down and hopelessly overmatch the sopranos and tenor. The Currentzis solution is not just a baritone, and not just a lyric baritone, but a lyric baritone of a sort certified as operatic only in recent decades.