Our Gilda was another singer I had been looking forward to hearing in her role. This was Rosa Feola, much praised at La Scala for her Gilda and Fiorilla (in Il Turco in Italia) just before arriving here. Stylistically well schooled and linguistically at home, she has an attractive lyric-coloratura instrument, and some acting talent, too. But the former is not quite complete, and the latter misused on this occasion. She’s one more addition to the swelling ranks of sopranos with little or no strength in the lower one-third of her range (read: little or no contact with the chest register, ergo, not much core or pungency anywhere). Up through the “Caro nome,” she sang with extreme caution, searching for her footing before letting out a phrase, and fading away toward the bottom. Later, she sang out more confidently, and let out a high D at the close of the “Vendetta” duet that was loud enough and squarely on pitch, but had that odd timbre (as of a musical saw, or maybe the Theramin) associated with the altissimi of Mado Robin or the young Natalie Dessay, up around the G above it. She tried to play a somewhat older and spunkier Gilda. Whether this was her idea or Sher’s I don’t know, but for some time now, it has been an artistically unfortunate side effect of whichever Waves of feminism we have been passing through that actresses of both the speaking and singing species have seen it as their bounden duty to present themselves as strong and independent personalities, and thus as transcendent of the actual circumstances of characters caught in benighted times (i.e., any but our own). It doesn’t make said characters braver (on the contrary) or less pitiable; only less credible. (For further on this particular example, see The Craft of Imagination: How to be Gilda, 10/17/20.) Feola carried out the resulting behavior with sincerity and spirit, but it’s a bootless errand.

Piotr Beczala’s best work here was in the recitative, “Ella mi fu rapita,” which was sung with clean force and conviction, and the following “Parmi veder le lagrime,” which had firm guidance of the line and, as elsewhere, a command of nice diminuendos in and just above the passaggio. If only the upper part of his range did not thin out relative to its solid middle and at times sound precarious, and if only his stage demeanor went beyond the sensible to register as a beguiling personality, if not an actual character, we’d have a singer to enthuse over. As it is, we have one to be grudgingly grateful for under the conditions that prevail. Andrea Mastroni’s Sparafucile was the first I’ve seen that presented this character as a slinky, light-footed fellow. Why not, I suppose, though it’s hardly what’s indicated, and he sang well with a middleweight bass of appropriate color, and gave us an on-the-button, long-held bottom F on his exit in the second scene. Varduhi Abrahamyan sang and played a passable Maddalena, though in this role we miss a true contralto of either the Northern or Southern EuroAmerican types. The subsidiary male characters, led by Craig Colclough as the Scruffy Old Coot, were all at least distinctly audible, while the female ones extended the Met’s status quo performance practice by being less so.