Isolde: This is an unhappy situation. Munich’s is Anja Harteros, a longstanding favorite of her home house, and a frequent partner of Kaufmann’s in increasingly dramatic assignments, some of which (the Forza Leonora; this role) seemed far from latent in her instrument the only time I heard her live, as a light-ish Donna Anna. At first, I was mildly surprised at the heft of a few high notes, but they proved unrepresentative of the voice as a whole. She resorts to workarounds we’d associate with a “character” voice, if there were such a thing as a Chargenheldensopran—white tone, straight tone, disproportionate bursts of energy, and so  on. The voice tires quickly, especially in the lower-middle range, so that at important junctures there that require a unbroken sounded connection of vowel to consonant, syllable to syllable (“Mir-er-kor-en, mir-ver-lor-en“), she can provide only the intention. In addition (one of video’s closeup cruelties), she is hard to watch, not because of poor acting choices or opera-house exaggerations the camera can’t accommodate, but because of singing tensions that pull her head down toward her left shoulder and her jaw out of alignment whenever the vocalizing becomes stressful. The Narrative and Curse come off as petulant protest, and Act 2, despite her musical understanding, is not better, with a harsh, bright top alternating with an unsteady midrange. The part is a wishful mistake for her.

Despite the presence over at Aix of what we might think of as “more of an Isolde voice” (that is, a rounder, fuller tonal format), the overall vocal effect is no more desirable. When I first heard Nina Stemme live (as Salome in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall with the Cleveland Orchestra under Welser-Möst), she did not strike me as either vocally or temperamentally quite right for such raw red meat. The Figaro Countess, a big-house Pamina, perhaps Elsa or Ariadne  or Arabella, seemed to me more where she belonged. The voice was attractive and ample enough, though, and she wasn’t in trouble. Now, she has pushed on through multiple Elektras, and on into this role, and the instrument’s a mess. There is not an underpinning, a contact with tonal core, that will sustain the line, and although she certainly knows what the phrases should be, except for some of the quieter midvoice ones, an infirmity extending to wobbliness undermines her efforts. By Act 3 the voice has virtually collapsed. Under Stone’s guidance, she and her Tristan do create some compelling acting sequences together. I’ll speak to that in a moment.

Tristan: It’s not often that the singers of this beast of a part hold up better and make more music than their soprano opposite numbers. But it’s the case twice over here. When I wrote about Kaufmann’s enjoyable first essay into Tristan’s music in a concert-form Act 2 with the BSO (see The Tristan Quadrangle, 4/26/18), I expressed some cautious optimism about the possibilities of the role for him. And I’d say the cautious optimism has proved justified, at least under the conditions prevailing here. Except with regard to true heroic calibre of tone, Tristan is at this point a much better fit for him than Otello (see Otello from Another Planet, 5/17/21) or some of the French and Italian lyric or spinto roles he undertook earlier in his career. The German language sits better in his throat, the shadowed timbre runs into fewer aesthetic contradictions, and the shorter compass of the writing at the top allows him to keep the voice a more compact unit. Because his technique does stay gathered around the passaggio and he has developed plenty of stamina, he’s able to hang in with the relentless, punishing demands just above and just below the center of the registral transition. In this tessitura, he is able to forego his falsetto substitute for mezza-voce and deal with restrained dynamics in the upper-middle range convincingly.