This is Rethberg close to retirement. It is true that there are a couple of moments of pitch slippage as she warms up, and that some of the gleam has turned to patina. Also true is the observation that there are few strokes of interpretive insight in her singing beyond those that emerge naturally from the contours of the composers’ settings. Finally, it’s not unfair to note, as does London Green in his article for the Guild release, that she and Brownlee together present an aural picture of a mature couple, a generation removed from Figaro and Susanna, which is certainly not what their known history tells us. What Rethberg was, however, was a great singer, in a sense that none of our other highly accomplished Countesses were. Her firm, authoritative voice and straightforward, no-nonsense musical instinct, of a kind that cut across styles and schools, never left one feeling unfulfilled (well, maybe Santuzza wasn’t truly her role), and after 25 years of leading roles in the operas of Mozart, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Puccini, Respighi, Halévy, et al., there wasn’t a trace of unsteadiness or distortion in her voice. Brownlee, prominent at the Opéra in Paris during the 1920s and ’30s, was almost exactly at career midpoint. His was never a glamorous instrument, and in the few seasons since his Glyndebourne recordings we can hear further encroachment of the leathery, throaty timbre that detracted from one’s listening pleasure over the next dozen years, which he escapes only when he clears into the upper range. Still, his Almaviva commands the respect due to singing of clarity, security, thrust, and well-drawn musical profile. With these artists, there are no notable differences between the New York and San Francisco performances.

It is with the other two female principals that we do hear significant differences, and they are less of quality than of character. Licia Albanese had joined the company late in the previous season, and to this point had sung only roles typically associated with her, Cio-Cio-San and Mimì (she’d done a Butterfly just two nights before this matinée). She retained Susanna in her repertory only briefly, and it’s easy to hear why, though in my judgment the reason usually offered (that she didn’t have a feel for “the Mozart style”) is quite beside the point. She observes all the stylistic markers I can count (including, as with her colleagues from time to time, appoggiaturas), and is entirely within the frame of the performance. (Granted, if one believes that the New Viennese, the Hanoverian, or some other set of Mozartean aesthetic guidelines is the only proper frame, then the entire performance can be considered “out of style.”) The problem, if one hears it as such (and I do, though it bothers me less than it used to), is not “stylistic,” but vocal, and is the same one that cropped up later, to different effect, in her Violetta, Manon Lescaut, et al.: the registers were not well balanced and soldered in the lower-middle part of her range. As a result, when she applies her characteristically bright, open Italian vowels and bouncy energy to the recits and many sung lines of the sprackly sort (as in “Venite, inginocchiatevi“) and aims for the spunky-girl timbre conventional for this type, what emerges is a keen-edged, shallow tone that does not fall gently on the ear. It must have carried, though, and when the writing gives her some altitude and line, the voice blooms into a clear, fresh lyric soprano timbre. In my listening notes, I find a find an enhanced tolerance for the virtues of both Albanese and Brownlee, despite their often less-than-engaging timbres, simply because everything is so clearly set forth, so unmistakably established. Out ‘Frisco way, they had the ever-charming Sayão, though Act 2 restricts her to the just-mentioned aria (slightly unsettled—lots of business to execute) and a great deal of ensemble playing. More of a true coloratura-leggiera than Albanese (she’d even done Zerbinetta in South America), she rides through with a perky but less brassy manner, one more born to the soubrette-ish or –ina mode.