In between these puzzling mistakes (for this is a talented production team, as they showed with their Simon Boccanegra), there’s a nice enough setting for Act 2, with Minnie’s cabin, open to us courtesy of the Fourth Wall, perched among the pines on the mountainside. There’s even some snow falling. But here, where the indoor/outdoor contrast really moves in on the action, the production brings us only a token naturalism. JK and Eva-Maria: When you step out the door, it’s cold out there! And gosh, don’t leave that door just hanging open! Cozy inside, bitter cold outside! Big wind! And if we’re going to do snow—as we must, this is a storm—let’s do it! Wind and snow, wounded guy, gal in nightgown! Some oh, so gentle flakes and a little swirl with the dear old wind machine won’t get there!  Might as well not have bothered! Major conditioning factor out the window, as it were! Sad!

I know: all this notwithstanding (but who else is going to write about all the foregoing? who? it’s my job), the fate of Fanciulla finally rides on its vocal and orchestral realization. Even granting the nearly determinative efforts of great tenors from Caruso on, this is really Minnie’s show. She has the most to sing, and is the most fully developed character. Despite the precedents of Destinn, an assoluta with dramatic capacities, Jeritza (a Santuzza and Brünnhilde, though the latter perhaps not advisedly), and Tebaldi, according to her own definition a big lyrico-spinto and by some distance the best recorded Minnie, the part does not require a dramatic soprano. A full, well-supported lyric voice with firmness and strength in the lower-middle range, deployed by a performer of feisty temperament and some acting smarts, can succeed in the role, as both Eleanor Steber (once she gets going), on the Florence recording, and Dorothy Kirsten, at the Met, demonstrated back in the day. ^(I) Westbroek’s voice is certainly sufficient in size, and of an attractive native timbre. But she’s an uneven singer: sometimes the tone is steady and well-gathered, but too often its vibrato turns wavery, and the center of the pitch is lost in the commotion. She is very careful about letting out the top, which at a couple of points seemed accident-prone, so she couldn’t quite take the full measure of the soaring phrases in “Laggiù nel Soledad” or the climactic end of Act 2. She’s an enjoyable stage personality, and I thought she had a good handle on the part as an actress, so I stayed engaged with her despite the vocal imperfections.

To see the name of Zelko Lucic in your program is to predict a solid enough baritone presence, and try to be content with that. It’s as if you had admired and ordered a large, shapely sculpture for your front lawn or foyer, but to have found, on prying open the crate, only a mass of the raw material, greyish and lightly rough, from which the sculpture might have been hewn. It’s the right material, all right, and in sufficient quantity, but it bears only the lightest markings of the mallet and chisel that might have given it real form and beauty. In some of his more restrained moments, like the “Pietà, rispetto” in Macbeth, he’s shown he can fashion an elegant and expressive line, but too much of his time is spent in dragging his voice along behind him with no true life in the tone or true legato in the line. Of the several roles I have seen him do since his debut in Gioconda on the second night of the Gelb managership, I thought Rance was perhaps his best. Still, after some nice touches of a mournful loneliness in “Minnie, dalla mia casa,”and while avoiding the incessant “I’m bad, I’m bad” snarliness that is the stereotypical noise for the part, he did not find much of the conflicted, volatile soul that could bring interest to the prevailingly declamatory (and mostly brief) utterances that follow.