As for our Eva: for some seven or eight minutes in Act 3, commencing with “O Sachs! mein Freund!” and—overlooking the absence of a couple of Davidsen’s lower phrases and allowing for Sachs’s “Ein Kind ward hier geboren“—extending through the Quintette, I had the sensation of an opera going on, of an ample, lovely soprano voice sustaining a decently drawn line that led the music forward and crested into gratifying notes at the top of the range. Her effect in the Act 2 duologue with Sachs had been intermittent, for reasons already suggested, and while she showed some stage savvy, she, too, was obligated to remnants of the jumpy and impossibly suggestive business originally devised for Karita Mattila, a performer of very different temperament. In addition to the relatively undeveloped state of her lower octave, she was clearly trying to keep it light and girlish, and at times pushed her tone into an unnatural brightness. That’s the last thing needed for the writing. Overall, this cast presented the sound of a group agreement to avoid anything hinting at depth or darkness, and afraid to put any pressure on their instruments. And to my ear, the fear is justified. Whatever the potential of these voices might have been, and however pleasing (in some cases) their surface sheen, they sound ready to collapse under any sustained effort at producing what has been, for at least a couple of hundred years, the standard calibration of operatic tone.

In that regard, one is always prepared to grant slack to conductors trying to wring satisfaction out of large-scale scores without troweling under the voices. Time after time, we are aware of a reluctance to loosen the reins, and of a search to find alternate ways (inner voices, a chamberish elucidation of textures, etc.) to locate eloquence within a drawn-in dynamic range. But I didn’t really find that approach in Pappano’s work with the orchestra, and did not hear much above the ordinary in the reading. The tempi sounded in just relationship—nothing idiosyncratic—and the orchestra played on through in recognizable proportions. But there seemed little interpretive spark. In the Preludes to Acts 1 and 3, where balance with the onstage sounds is not at issue, sheer sonic quality and balance was disappointing, the first suffering from brash brass tone and a tuneless thudding from the percussion, unmatched by any richness or underpinning from the strings, and the second from a drowsy intoning that simply didn’t enter into emotional exploration of this, the most profound passage of the work. Nor did there seem much energy directed toward urging the singers onward and outward. I have the feeling, based in part on past recordings, that Pappano may be of more value in Italian repertory. But then, I also wondered if this were not simply the level this orchestra is capable of at the moment, absent truly galvanic leadership. The chorus sang well, in the purely musical sense, though not always with much dramatic point—the apprentices’ taunting of David, for instance, or the bleating “Me-e-e-ck” of the tailors, were extremely polite versions of those little characterizations.