At the other extreme of Spyres’ rep, we encounter three major baritone arias, and two more that would be such if left at score pitch. The best of these is the “Largo al factotum,” which Spyres sings with a sprightly relish and dashing articulation, and with top Gs that are certainly plausible, if not thrilling. I expected his tenor half to throw in some hi jinx up to the A, like fellow Americans Tibbett or Milnes, but he doesn’t. This is the one of these baritone parts that I can imagine him singing in the theatre to good vocal and stylistic effect. The other two are Di Luna (Il Trovatore) and Tonio (Pagliacci). I’ll comment on those excerpts below. The two pieces that appear to be baribaritone proclamations but turn out to be in disguise are the Count’s recitative and aria from Le Nozze di Figaro and the Chanson Bachique from Thomas’ Hamlet. For the former, we can leave behind any lingering traces of bass-baritone vs. high baritone preferences. This is the rewrite Mozart did for the Vienna premiere, which, from the first “Tu non nascesti audace” onward, takes the number up into the territory of the high divisions of “Fuor del mar.” In doing so, it rather returns the Count to Mozart’s opera seria manner, seeking to bury the opposition beneath angry high-pitched flourishes rather than to dominate with the tonal authority and strong outline of the original; the architecture disappears beneath the decoration. It would have been a good piece for the elderly Raaff or for Jadlowker, and at least in the old tuning, Battistini could have pinned back our ears with it. Spyres sings it with dash and fire; I doubt that even our most adept of latter-day high-baritone Counts could do it as well. The Hamlet Drinking Song is not a rewrite, but simply the piece we are familiar with, set one full step higher, as per Thomas’ original intention (of Hamlet as a tenor part), and presented in full panoply with its preceding recitative and choral responses. I don’t find it at all persuasive as character representation, especially in the melancholic middle section (“La vie et sombre! les ans sont courts,” etc.), and Spyres doesn’t find any special way to illuminate it. But again, he sings it well.

There’s a pair of arias out of the Classical/Romantic bridge decades. One, from Méhul’s Ariodant (evidently recorded for the first time here), is a prayer of desperation sung out of the father/child sacrificial predicament so often set in some variation (including Mozart’s in Idomeneo) in the Classical period. The other, sung in the original French and not in the Italian translation used in the rare 20th-Century revivals, is from Spontini’s La Vestale, and brings us the transgressing-priestess-and-her-lover problem best known to us from Norma. They are both well-structured pieces with strong accompanimental underpinnings (the Méhul has a long and quite gripping orchestral introduction), and well set for the voice in terms of dramatic rhetoric, if not of thematic inspiration. And they are Spyres’ best claims on baritenor status of the sort that extends a baritone’s voice into a tenor’s domain—a certain type of baritone, and a certain type of tenor. By E-19 standards, his baritone is of light-middleweight calibre, with a lot of the headiness noted in his high-extension adjustment already present farther down. (Perhaps that is why it proved feasible to train a tenor continuance.) In that respect, it has a lot in common with the better postwar Lieder baritones (I think particularly of Hermann Prey), or with Theodor Uppman, the first Billy Budd, whose grainy, soft-textured voice could incorporate Pelléas and Eisenstein in its repertoire. Its timbre also recalls that of the American show baritone: Spyres-as-baritone could effectively sing anything Alfred Drake, for instance, sang, and with greater vocal presence. Considered as tenor (the nominal category of the Ariodant and Vestale roles), it is capable of surmounting the compass and tessitura of the writing, which are those of the Handel and Mozart tenor, and of the Heldentenor—but with the prevailing color of the voice just described, which happens to work in Spyres’ energetic attacks on these scenes (his superior linguistic grasp and identification with how this musical idiom can light up the dramatic picture carry them along), so long as one can relinquish any expectations of clear, ringing tenor sound.