Dimitri: Charles Kullman/René Maison. Kullman’s attractive, middle-sized tenor, while not without touches of the timbral dryness and suspect footing that invaded it as he answered the call as all-purpose house protagonist in the war years, is in good shape on this broadcast. His proclamations as Grigori in the cell are on the stodgy side (not easy music to form a line with), but things warm up in the Sandomierz act, and the top of the voice soars out with some real zing at the duet’s end. Maison, though we think of him as of French cultivation (he was Belgian), actually reached his highest artistic level in the Jugendlich Wagner parts of Walther, Lohengrin, and Parsifal—that, at least, is the impression left by his live performance recordings from the Met and the Colón. An intense and imaginative singer with a strong voice of interesting color, he drove hard into the upper range, with the result that in his French roles pages of committed, effective singing could be followed by bars of unpleasantly hard-pressed, straight tone. In the Wagner parts, with A-natural the limit for sustained notes, the problem was seldom confronted, and the voice could settle into a manageable framework that gave him interpretive leeway. His Dimitri dates from his last Metropolitan season and, with the straightness and squeezing descending into his upper-middle range, he was assigned what amounts to an Italian Romantic tenor role of spinto or even dramatic calibre, many parts of which are set into a not terribly accommodating roadbed. He finds ways to cope, and once in a while searches out an interesting inflection, e. g., a half-voiced, almost murmured “e Dio ti punirà” at the end of the Cell Scene. But between the straightness and the overly opened midrange “a,” I sometimes felt I’d stumbled into a too-late Del Monaco performance.

Shuisky: Alessio de Paolis/Alessio de Paolis. One of the shrewdest career decisions I know of was that of this Roman lyric tenor, assuredly capable but not competitive in the long run with the best of his day, and not physically endowed so as to suggest the romantic hero, to turn to character roles. He had an extraordinary bent for the range of suggestive, insinuating, conspiratorial hues that the comprimario repertory can embrace, a keen sense of timing and of intentional contrast with the vocal and physical behaviors of leading singers, and a willingness to twist his voice into any constricted or nasalized deformation to make attitudinal effects and devious actions utterly clear. At this point, he also had enough strength left in the voice to clinch a ploy with some force, whether in the higher range (with Boris in the Terem scene, at the entrance of the Dimitri theme) or in the midrange (as with his description of Boris’ condition to the boyars in Act 4, straightforwardly sung without “special” colorations). As one who came about his work later on, when he could sometimes irritatingly impress as a voiceless wonder with a well-thumbed catalogue of shtick at his disposal, I’ve found it bracing to rehear his Prince Shuisky. It is possible to debate whether or not this character should be presented in such an overtly obsequious, manipulative light. But if that is the considered choice, then one could not ask for it to be carried out with greater expertise. The listener is left in no doubt about the nature of every little turn of events, and the significance of each. There’s nothing of importance to choose between the two performances.