Queen of Spades is not an easy work to resolve stylistically, and its succession of scenes, several of them quite short, with major shifts between dark, closed-in settings and big, opened-out ones, none of which may be skimped, presents practical problems, too. This production has always seemed to me uneasily suspended between its abstract and representational elements. But, with good assistance from Paul Pyant’s lighting scheme, it has some highly effective moments and sustains the moods of its scenes. It advocates for the work, rather than critiquing it, and does not enslave the opera in an auteurial conceptualization, so I’m not inclined to complain. Its staging and material elements have been well maintained, with Peter McClintock in charge of this year’s re-staging.

The greatest advance interest in this revival attached to the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, of whom reports of performances in major European venues and of her recently released debut CD have been enthusiastic, and to the Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, whose background has included important orchestral positions (Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic) and prominent operatic assignments. Both were making their house debuts with this run.

Ms. Davidsen made a good impression. Her voice would be traditionally described as Jugendlich Heldensopran, and certainly one of the best of that type to come forward in the last couple of decades. Its overall timbre I’d term a silvery blonde. Its span of color doesn’t seem very wide, and that limits her “acting with the voice” options; on the other hand, it’s not daubed with the dark artificial dyes with which so many such voices try to bulk themselves up. Its amplitude is satisfying in this weight of role and its intonation is excellent. While her guidance of the line didn’t always etch the sharpest profile, it was smooth. I had heard tell of some straight tone at the top in her first performance, but at mine (Dec. 18) that wasn’t evident—the emission sounded free, and though the climactic high phrases of Acts 2 and 3 were not quite thrilling, they were undistorted and untroubled. Her very circumspect treatment of the lowest phrases made one wonder if much is available down there for a role like Sieglinde (a pending assignment for her at Bayreuth and the Met). About her physical acting, I would prefer to suspend judgment. Her work was intelligent but emotionally constrained; there wasn’t much indication of an aristocratic young woman being sucked into a vortex of craziness. However, like Guleghina and Gorchakova before her, she was here stepping into a repertory revival, more or less obligated to the moves originated by the collaboration of Moshinsky with the production’s first Lisa, the compelling Karita Mattila, for whom this was one of the finest achievements. That’s a hard act to follow, and there will be further opportunities to assess Davidsen as thespian.

I had the same sort of reservedly favorable impression of our new conductor, also taking his first local steps in a revival, with an unfamiliar orchestra and house acoustic. The Met in my lifetime has had some notable maestros in charge of Russian operas (I think primarily of Dmitri Mitropoulos and Georg Solti), but the most effective playing of this repertory has come from Russian companies and conductors in their New York stands. By the time the Moscow Bolshoi came our way with six productions in 1975, the conductors we had come to know on Soviet recordings with the ensembles of the Bolshoi, the Leningrad Kirov and Maly, and the U.S.S.R. State Radio (Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Boris Khaikin, Vassily Nebolsin, Samuel Samosud, Alexander Melik-Pashayev, et al.) were not with the company. But its Musical Director, Yuri Simonov, who led the three three standard repertory operas during the New York run, was a solid specimen, and the orchestra and chorus were in full cry. In High Fidelity/Musical America (Oct. 1975) I wrote of ” . . . the unusually easy and satisfying projection, night after night, of orchestral and choral sound of true grand-opera weight and beauty . . . for the first time in years, I found myself sitting down to performances confident that there would not be moments—or whole performances—that simply did not project . . . The Bolshoi slaked, at least momentarily, our thirst for old-fashioned operatic power and sweep . . . ” ^(I) And when the Kirov/Maryinsky began its visits under Valery Gergiev (a more energetic leader than Simonov) in the late 1990s, we again experienced a harmonic filling-in and presence of sound that the house band, for all its admirable qualities, had not been giving us. Gergiev has not been able to achieve the same levels of tension and weight with the Met orchestra. But when the present Pikovaya dama was new, he captured much of the score’s mood in the lurching and sighing string writing, much of its darkling tint, and of the suspense and shock that intrudes on the “normalcy” it so carefully sets up.