The men fare less well. Seth Carico (the father in The Intruder) has a character baritone of edgy quality, but at least it’s firm. Stephen Bronk, who appears in all three segments, owns a light bass voice whose quality is pleasant enough, but which does not hold steady under any stress of volume or range and can’t zero in on the closed French vowels. He manages in the relatively gentle writing for The Old Man (Interior) and Aglovale (Tintagiles), but in the crucial role of the grandfather in The Intruder the constant shakiness undermines the part’s effect. The tenor of Thomas Blondelle suffers from the same lack of stability, so that when the uncle in The Intruder gets worked up we would like him to sit down and be quiet, and when The Stranger in Interior must navigate some of the unprepared loud-to-soft changes I mentioned above, the singer must simply let go of the voice’s engagement and resort to falsetto—there’s no trace of messa di voce to provide the needed continuity. Both these singers are applying themselves with commitment to the expressive demands, but the technical shortcomings compromise their work as surely as they would in any pre-Modern opera. Salvador Macedo takes the speaking role of Tintagiles, and to my ear is fine, from his flat, matter-of-fact answers in the opening  dialogue with Ygraine to his anguished calls from the far side of the fateful door at the end.

When Act 4 of Tintagiles brings us the scene of the scheming maidservants, the jig is up with the falsettists. My regular readers (or even those who may have started only with the last post, on Handel’s Agrippina) will know that I am no enthusiast for the employment of falsettists in any operatic role. There is a distinction to be made, though, between roles in which a falsettist is being made to substitute for another voice type (female or castrato) and one written specifically for this usage. According to my own rules of vocal order, the former is proscribed on grounds of both principle and effect. The latter, though, can’t be objected to on principle. A creator is certainly entitled to write for this vocality whenever he imagines an important affect of character or mood that no other usage will convey as well. It’s then up to us to evaluate how that works out. In the present case, Reimann has evidently reasoned that the servants of the Queen, identified as female, should sound weird, unnatural; and that this is more easily accomplished by falsettists sounding the way they perforce sound than by women trying to sound weird and unnatural. Recollecting the noises made by choristers attempting to, e.g., characterize the witches in Verdi’s Macbeth, I don’t necessarily disagree. However, while the faintly spooky effect made by Reimann’s falsetto settings in the brief Interludes of L’Invisible can be heard as at least unharmful to his cause, it’s quite another matter to bring these voices into the action and ask them to sustain dramatic gestures in the manner of persons. And it must be foreseen that roles like these will not attract the world’s star falsettists. These three are as devoted to their mission as the other cast members, and as musicianly, too. But their feeble, hollow timbres and hooty vowels, especially in the lower-middle, conversational range, preclude any aesthetic or dramatic achievement. This key scene is a disaster. The roles should be re-designated for women’s voices, and perhaps the writing reconsidered at some points to more favorably accommodate them.