But there’s the sticker: “well-supported and equalized.” The problem in Polenzani’s singing is not at the top, which is well-tuned, moderately strong, and pleasing in timbre. If his entire range were calibrated to it, we’d have a very listenable Nadir. But we still would not have—it shouldn’t need saying—a Don Carlos. And that evenness of calibration is not present. The lower two-thirds of his voice will evidently bear only the gentlest of pressures. So he is continually singing at what is at its strongest a mezzo-piano, from which he effects incessant diminuendi, leaving the impression not that he is a master of dynamic niceties, but that he cannot sustain firm tone of any duration. Dramatically, too, he did not create much impression. He worked hard at showing us Carlos’ unhinged responses to his serious emotional predicament (there’s a lot of hands-pressed-over-ears in this show), but without first establishing with his bearing and attitude that this unhinged fellow has been reared at court, and is after all the Infante of Spain. Though he hung in to the end of what in the five-act version is a fairly long role, none of it really convinced.

Playing opposite Polenzani was Sonia Yoncheva, and I’m rather at a loss to find much to say of her work here. I had enjoyed, with some reservation, both her Violetta and Luisa Miller. (For some observations on her voice and technique as of four years ago, see An Uptick for Verdi, 5/11/18). Elisabeth, though, is a step up into another category of vocal calibre and personal stature. Like Carlos, it is not necessarily the exclusive province of voices in the dramatic or spinto soprano categories. I have heard it sung very badly by singers of those descriptions, and quite satisfyingly by, for instance, Raina Kabaivanska, whose compact, firm lirico-spinto instrument combined with a stylistic authority and incisive physical presence to register strongly in the role. But Yoncheva’s voice was noticeably lighter than that, even as heard in  those previous assignments, and if her singing at this performance (that of March 3) is at all representative, it has suffered in the interim. Without sounding in imminent peril, it was pale and lacking in thrust, with its upper range detached in an apparent attempt to avoid heaviness. Her acting was sensible enough, but without passion or, at the least, security in the voice to drive it, it could not establish command.

In the juicy and challenging part of the Princess Eboli, we had another substitution. I say “another” not because there’ve been so many this season (considering the Covid postponement factor, we might have expected more), but because on the occasion of the above-mentioned Hytner production there had been a cancelation in this role—and by the same singer, Elina Garança. I hoped at the time that, having sung the role in London, she had wisely concluded that it was not for her. And indeed it is not, by any opera-in-good-health standard. Yet I confess that given her glamorous presence, her stage spark and savvy, and in the hope that her decently-ordered mezzo-soprano might have strengthened somewhat without unraveling, hers was one of the two announced Don Carlos casting assumptions I was looking forward to with some curiosity. But she stepped aside again, presumably for pandemic-related reasons (or possibly because she didn’t care to re-learn the part in a different language for what is probably a one-off assignment?), and her place was taken by Jamie Barton. I had curiosity about her, too, since her truly doleful Orfeo of 2019, followed by her more recent and more encouraging Brangäne of the Munich vidop Tristan had left me undecided about her, particularly inasmuch as those excursions had seemed the products of two entirely different singers. And this Brangäne/Eboli parlay took me back to the days of Blanche Thebom and Irene Dalis, who both played it to honorable effect.