Magdalene (Christa Mayer): A part, like a couple of others of Wagner’s, that is designated as soprano, but nearly always cast with a mezzo or even contralto, because a strong lower range is demanded to project her chattery conversation and establish her more mature identity. She needs to sound important, in charge, and her exchanges here with Eva should suggest both the intimacy and the authority of a longtime nurse/child-to-grown-woman relationship. Mayer seems to understand the musical gestures and inflections that would convey these qualities.  Her voice, though, is an attractive but slack light mezzo with no strength toward the bottom—a presentable Siebel, perhaps. She does get off a nice high A in the second act riot scene.

David (Sebastian Kohlepp): His is a darker, less adolescent quality than we usually encounter in this music. As we proceed, Kohlepp discloses full-throated high Bs where so many falter or finesse, and in Act 3 renders a sturdy “Am Jordan sankt Johannes stand.” There’s good tenor material here. But in the lengthy Scene 2 descriptions of the Master tones and forms—the heart of the role, where the voice’s limberness must still evince clarity and steadiness—Kohlepp’s vibrato patterns go wild throughout the middle and lower range, to the extent that it is hard to tell when he’s trying to ornament or trill, and when to simply sustain a tone. As with his tenorial colleague in this scene, some of the irritations we often associate with the traditional kinds of Spieltenor characterization have been sidestepped, only to be replaced by more serious vocal ones. It doesn’t make for happy listening.

The common lacks in all these voices are a solid grounding in their respective lower ranges; a resonantal core; a tautness of line and sustained support at softer dynamics; and a crisp immediacy of articulation—nothing flashes out. These are all qualities associated with the proper development and balanced integration of chest voice, whether the instrument is male or female, high or low, light or heavy. It’s the prevailing problem of contemporary operatic singing. The result in these scenes is that we often do not hear complete phrase shapes. Descending endings fade away (or, in Kohlepps’s case, do land, but in a tremulous puddle). This also means that not only the musical thoughts, but the verbal ones, are incomplete, and the rhyming couplet pattern is lost. This last may seem unimportant, but apart from the felicitous euphony of such rhymes when they land (even when delayed—”Fluch . . . Tuch . . . Buch“), in a scene so dependent on wordplay and such bits of shtick as the confusion over the three Davids (the two in paintings, and the live character just then present)^(I), which gives Eva her loveliest singing-out opportunity in the scene with the phrases “das Schwert im Gurt, die Schleuder zur Hand/das Haupt von lichten Locken umstrahlt,” arcing the octave between A-flats, I think it’s not.