As Ariadne, Davidsen was heard to her best advantage here to date. (Chrysothemis, coming up, should also be a good fit.) Those opening cries of “A-a-ch!“, B-flat carried up to F-flat, then pressed into for the mournful crescendo, announced a voice belonging to a species separate from the others being heard, and over the succeeding seventy minutes or so we heard long passages of large, beautiful, steady tone, well-tuned and well-connected, in the upper octave of her voice. No other soprano singing now, or over the past couple of decades, can fill the house this way. She also has at beck and call a keen high subito pianissimo, like the one called for at “und ging im Licht“, flicked up to the high B-flat by a crush note an octave below, in “Ein Schönes war.” As we’ve noted previously, there’s a falloff in the lower octave, but so far, the voice remains clear and coherent there, if not always as full and rich as one would like. To the extent that there is any trouble in the voice at the moment, it’s with upper-middle phrases at controlled dynamics (mp to mf), where the tone can turn cloudy. But it doesn’t interfere often or for long. Her shaping of phrases is sometimes, let’s call it, blunt, and that can make for a feeling of relentlessness—though still a relentlessness of that separate species. She is scheduled next season for the Marschallin, a very different proposition. That will tell us more, but meanwhile it’s wonderful to be reminded of what a big-role soprano sounds like.

I had not caught up with Brandon Jovanovich since seeing him as Ralph Rackstraw with our New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players in 1999. I remember thinking at the time that his was the best tenor voice I’d heard with that troupe; but of course Rafe is not the sort of challenge Jovanovich has taken on of late, like Sergei in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which he will sing again at the Met in the fall. Or Bacchus, which, though not long, contains most of the demands that can be made on an instrument of the Jugendlich Heldentenor type. His voice has taken on the darkened hue common to contemporary tenor voices of all but the lightest weight, and for so long as Bacchus’ music lies in tessitura topping out around the upper A-flat, he sings it with comfort and, in many phrases, a good sense of line and shape. Those conditions hold through the central portion of the role. Before and after, however, he is less comfortable. The offstage cries of “Circe!“, etc., sounded awkward, and his upper range narrows and recedes too much for him to surmount the ecstatically mounting phrases of the final minutes. Bacchus’ last utterance, beginning at “Durch deine Schmerzen bin ich Reich,” is a leading candidate for the greatest sweep-her-off-her-feet climax ever written, and it needs more ring and release.

The news is not good with respect to the remaining important female roles. Our protester’s “no technique!” accusation is not really fair, since after all Brenda Rae does have the high extension required of a Zerbinetta, and negotiates the fiendishly devised obstacle course of the part while executing, albeit entirely mechanically, the endlessly irritating choreographic “interpretation” imposed by the direction. However, the protester was getting at something, for Rae’s high soprano, lacking in body and bite (we need at least one or the other), is perceptible only at the top, and she cannot sustain where sustainment is called for, which is more often than one might suppose from the most obvious characteristics of the setting. The mystery cover for the Komponist (and this must have been a last-minute pullout, since there was not a program insert) was Olivia Vote. She is listed as a mezzo-soprano on the roster, but is in reality a lyric soprano of bland timbre and no reach at either end of her range, far out of her depth in this role. In an instance like this we cannot blame the singer, but the person or persons whose errant judgment put her in this position. Unlike Zerbinetta, Bacchus, or Ariadne, this part’s basic requirements are within the capacities of many singers, whether nominally soprano or mezzo-soprano.