After an intermission extended far past the usual Swells at Supper limit due to the special tenor situation (see below), Rachvelishvili cranked up to operatic format for the last two acts, and sang a solid Dalila with some exciting passages. And that’s the takeaway—a good Dalila from one of the roster’s few authentic grand opera performers. But just because she is that, and the standard of greats like Homer, Stignani, and Gorr is not ludicrously inapplicable to her, this peculiarity in her lower midrange, and choices she makes regarding dynamics, is of interest. And the recurring problem is that, whether by Northern or Southern, alto or mezzo means, she does not consistently keep that crucial area filled in, and the receptor’s ear sometimes loses track of what she’s about. It’s not because she lacks chest voice—she has plenty of that. But except in a few overtly dramatic spots, she does not invite it into the mix until she’s descended to C or B, leaving a weak patch which she is left to represent as subtlety. To what extent this weakness is technical and to what extent temperamental I don’t know. It doesn’t sound as if there should be difficulty in bringing the blend up a note or two, and her admirable quest for nuance can seem merely picky. (One instance: why, in “Amour, viens aider,” would one choose to loudly implore the God of Love to see to it that, vanquished by one’s wiles, Samson shall be—and now, suddenly cutting the volume back—in chains on the morrow? Apart from what Saint-Saëns has marked, which is the reverse, what point is being made? I suspect it’s the “I’m not just an inartistic loudmouth” point. I’ll gladly second her on that, if she’ll just keep the music moving, and fill in the notes.

As my regular readers know, I regard this question of lower-midrange bonding to be the most important one in the structuring of the female voice, far more significant than that of the “secondo passaggio” or of big high notes. That’s why I repeatedly call attention to how it manifests in different voice types and different styles of writing. And I must not leave the impression that it doesn’t leave troublesome traces in even the great voices. Stignani quite shamelessly turned the vowel “e” into “a” on the pitches just above the passaggio, and in the latter part of her career (though I don’t hear it in the Samson arias) that “a” could become muffled. Homer’s “a” on those same notes, though solid, is very turned in, almost an “uh,” and she enters under the pitch for a second on the D-flat at “A-a-h, réponds” in the refrain to the first verse of “Mon coeur,” owing to a bit of “drag” on the voice from underneath. These same notes are every bit as determinative in the male voice, where they fall in the upper-middle range.

And speaking of that, let us look briefly at Samson’s music. In compass and tessitura, it’s Siegmund raised a half-step (Siegmund doesn’t have Samson’s high B-flats or the insistence of  his A-flats and A’s; Samson doesn’t have extended passages quite as low as the second half of “Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater” or the first part of the Todesverkūndigung). In layout, both parts are horizontal (mostly narrow intervals, few wide leaps, no rangey florid writing), with repetitive focus in the upper midrange. Even in the distribution of declamatory vs. lyrical expression, the two roles are not far apart. It’s a true dramatic tenor part, though one calling for great suppleness of line and a clarity and brilliance of tone that rules out all the thick, dark voices that are now called “Helden,” “di forza,” etc. In terms of really meeting its demands, Vickers was its last great exponent, Domingo its last good one.