As previously reported, Stuart Skelton shouldn’t have been out there as Otello on Dec. 17, or Marcelo Alvarez as Luigi on Dec. 5. But this was worse, and since I hadn’t heard Antonenko for several years, I can’t honestly say how much was due to the cold announced at intermission and how much to the current overall condition of his voice. But the Met management was extremely fortunate to be able to call on Gregory Kunde, who was not even on the company’s roster, to come to the evening’s rescue and stay on for the remaining performances. He sang with great musicality and security, behaved as if he’d been in the production from the start, and all in all displayed extraordinary professional sangfroid. The late-career transition he has made, from early Ottocento bel canto roles to later spinto and dramatic ones, voice intact and in balance, is a remarkable one. Now, is he a true dramatic tenor, and can he thrill us in roles like this one (or Chénier, which I saw him do in Rome a couple of seasons back)? “No” to the first question, and “not quite” to the second. He’s a Faust, an Edgardo, perhaps a Riccardo or Stolzing. But even in the heavy assignments he has been taking on in Europe, his singing is more enjoyable and reliable than that of the other suspects we’ve heard, and I hope that, late as the date is for him (he’s in his mid-60s), the Met will find a way to bring him back.

The three male supporting roles are, or should be, far more than functional. The High Priest is certainly the most important of them. Like Marcello or Valentin, he was once regularly cast with leading baritone or bass-baritone voices. As noted, Dufranne, creator of Golaud, sang it for Hammerstein, and for the Chicago and Boston companies as well. In the Met’s mounting for Caruso, the greatvoiced Pasquale Amato assumed the role, and in the ’20s, when Martinelli succeeded Caruso as Samson, it was taken by Clarence Whitehill, the Met’s pre-eminent Wotan and Hans Sachs in the years between Emil Fischer and Friedrich Schorr. (Journet, heard as the Old Hebrew in the trio record with Caruso and Homer, was actually better suited to this part, and sang it in Chicago.) In the ’30s Ezio Pinza sang it, in the ’40s Leonard Warren, and in the early ’50s Robert Merrill. We got back to cultural authenticity with the admirable Martial Singher in the mid-’50s, and in the production new in 1964, Gabriel Bacquier made his company debut as the High Priest. This year brought Laurent Naouri, a well-schooled, energetic light bass whom we could consider to be in the Singher/Bacquier line, but with a narrower, smaller instrument that was always audible but never dominant. He gave a cleanly declaimed recitation of the part, no more.

The roles of Abimélech and the Old Hebrew were so determined by staging constraints that they are perhaps best considered in relation to the production, which was directed by Darko Tresnjak. Those of us who follow New York theatre know Tresnjak to be a smart, cultivated man with an eye for visual style and an active interest in opera. So it must be from conviction, rather than ignorance, that he and his set designer, Alexander Dodge, have given Samson a look antithetical to its aesthetic. Though the costuming, by Linda Cho, is “in period” (at least we are spared the “relevance” of 21st-Century Gaza), the sets, seen through a disc-shaped cutout that keeps us at arm’s length, have a down-rent, modernist, geometric cast that goes against the lush, Orientalist tone of the music. They feel like Florida in the 1950s. The staging of the principals often has what I term The Drama Cancellation Effect. In Act 1, Abimélech, who needs to be imposing and his intrusion a threat, sings most of his sequence from a little pocket turret in a wall, descending barely in time to be killed. The Old Hebrew comes off as a benign bystander, not a craggy elder intervening in what he knows to be a potentially calamitous development for his people. The singers of these parts (baritone Tomasz Konieczny and basso Günther Groissböck) were competent without having quite the presence to overcome the inertia. The ending of Act 2 (the man’s hair is cut off! his eyes are put out!) is left untheatricalized: Samson enters Dalila’s house and comes out again.