When Ross does engage with acts of vocalism too up-front to ignore, he is on shaky ground. He tries hard to describe Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth: “warm, billowy, but not exactly acrobatic;” “filled the house with beautiful, grand tone;” but “too beautiful, too tasteful;” and the role “requires a heavier, dark-tinged instrument.” These adjectival phrases dance around the edges of what was true and interesting to observe of Netrebko’s singing of this music, which is that a voice that was when first heard here essentially bright, well-centered, and decidedly acrobatic (her recorded Lyudmilla with the Maryinsky) will bear witness), had soon migrated toward a lusher, darker sound in quest of fuller-seeming tone that was indeed of lovely quality but by no means “house-filling,” and, so far from needing greater weight or penumbrous color was in fact lacking in the core and brilliance it needed instead to knife through the textures and gestures of Verdi’s dramatic soprano writing. In his William Tell review, Ross chose to focus on Gerald Finley in the title part, which, like that of Moses in Rossini’s other late serious opera, is rather underwritten for its importance. Of Finley, Ross wrote that his voice, which had recently tackled Hans Sachs (!), had acquired greater heft and darkness. I listened for that, but it was not there, either as Tell or as Athanaël a season or two later—this was the same pleasing, smoothly guided light-middleweight baritone I had heard in the Haitink/BSO Pelléas in 2003, when I thought it would be better suited, in timbre and size if not range, to the name role. Ross’s description was simply misleading as reporting. So when he writes of performers I have not heard, or who have been gone for a while, or are essaying some new assignment that may seem a stretch, what am I (are we) to believe?

Staging: I mean by this everything a director and his design team are responsible for: the physical production, the physical acting of the principals, the staging itself (the movements and positionings of all onstage personnel), and co-ordination of all these—in short, the visual interpretation of the work. I had never known Ross to declare himself on the subject, save through the indirect means of his reactions to particular stagings. Has he, I’ve often wondered, any standard of evaluation, any beliefs about the role of directorial interpretation, or of its boundaries? To me, this comes down to a single question of principle: does he (or do you) believe the director is empowered to “write the text anew,” to assume the prerogatives of the auteur and, if he should happen to be uncomfortable with a work’s social or political values, substitute his own? Or do you think, as I do, that all interpreters should work within the boundaries set by the creators of works, who took the initial steps into the infinite field of phenomena to fashion something that occupies a unique standing in the world, whose integrity it is the interpreters’ imperative to preserve? Everything depends on one’s answer to that question, which for me is one of artistic ethics. It’s not a matter of liking or disliking, admiring or loathing, but of agreement or disagreement, and not with the values of the works themselves, but with the principle as stated above.