Looking back over Nézet-Séguin’s recommendations, we see that they are without exception directed toward a toning-down, a smoothing-over, that reduces the presence of the voices he is working with. His baseless assertion regarding the presumed weakness of the lower part of the soprano voice; his worse-than-useless instruction for “more breath” from his baritone; and his suppression of his basso’s splendid lower range show both a pallid taste and ignorance of vocal structure. His more helpful remarks all relate to the development of the messa di voce (swell-and-diminish); yet his other suggestions actually make that more difficult. Except for his one admonition to his soprano to “keep it dark,” he doesn’t deal with tonal color as an expressive tool (or, to put it another way, the sensory/emotional value of wordnote inflection), and (especially odd for a conductor) does not urge more emphatic attention to accents and other articulations. On top of that, the views he offers on character interpretation range from the not-well-thought-through to the downright eccentric.

I’m not worried about these young singers. They will have returned to their teachers and coaches, and continued to progress along whatever paths they are on. (I’m fairly certain we’ll be hearing from our Elisabetta, whose name is Maritina Tampakopoulos.) What worries me is this: in an operatic world desperately lacking in singers of major calibre, and in which our foremost opera house is already a place where much of the repertory is so undersung as to be ineffectual, the man in charge of musical matters there for the indefinite future, through whom all casting must pass; whom all singers must please and all the musical staff answer to; and whose preferences beam out signals to all gatekeepers and aspirants outside the company, is the man described above. It’s a bleak prospect.

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NEXT TIME:  Gershwin and Heyward’s Porgy and Bess has returned to the Met. We’ll give a look and a listen, and report on Friday, Nov. 1.