I found Nézet-Séguin’s work on the Roméo scene even more discouraging than the Don Carlo session. ^(I) The work begins at Frère Laurent’s “Dieu qui fit l’homme” and continues to the end of the scene. Up until the brief celebratory quartet at the end, this sequence belongs almost exclusively to the Laurent, and I was initially excited to hear the young bass taking this role because of the easily booming sonority of his low range. Gounod was clearly writing to just such a sound, which any number of French basses of his day could have given him, and the gravity of the friar’s pronouncements depend in part upon it. Now, I’m hard put to give you a reference point for it. Nicola Moscona, on the ’47 Met broadcast, gives a good performance, but the low Gs, though present, don’t really resound. There’s Léon Rothier on the 1935 Met broadcast—close to the end and wobbly on sustained tones, but with the right timbre, range, tonal weight, and stylistic authority—and there’s the imposing Maxim Mikhailov on the 1947 Bolshoi recording, in Russian. That’s about it. Yet here was the easy sit on resonant notes down to those Gs (and clearly that was not the bottom of his compass) in a young Juilliard bass! Farther up, his voice slips into a covered, heady adjustment that is pleasant enough, but lacking in core and not yet following through on the promise of the lower octave, which is the measure of what the voice could become.

Now, N-S is not trying to re-arrange the functional elements of his singers’ voices. He is only  coaching, under peculiar circumstances, with whatever the students can bring to the table. But such coaching can encourage a healthy direction—a growth direction—in a voice, or not. In this case, N-S first congratulates his Laurent on his fine low notes, and then proceeds to diminish them at every juncture—not only the Gs, but the several Cs and Ds, which are still in the singer’s resonant territory. They are all meant to land; they, not the top notes (which are only Ds, in any case) are the “money notes” of such an instrument. But instead of nudging this voice toward completion, N-S maneuvers its strong, intriguing part into line with its weaker, less interesting one, and so, having started with a voice of great potential that needs more underpinning toward the top, ends with more of our Modest Young Artist Niceness, of which we already suffer a surfeit. Even the big crescendo at “Parvienne aux royaumes des cieux!“, which is the climax of Laurent’s pronouncement, is patty-caked into a kind of faux-lyrical demurral, the Sunday benediction at your local little brown church in the vale. And when he turns to the answering lines of the lovers, he again offers a puzzling interpretive idea—that they sing as if seized with teenage hormonal excitability. Well, precisely wrong. These are the flatly intoned, reverential responses of two young people in mortal defiance of their warring families and religious convention, much in need of blessing. N-S’s notion contradicts the dedicatory solemnity of the music.