One more high French baritone offering (designated Baryton-Martin) is from Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole. This is one of two direct-address monologues sung by the muleteer Ramiro between his clock-lugging trips up and down the stairs of Torquemada’s shop at the behest of his enticing wife, Concepcion. Both begin with the same words (“Voilà ce que j’appelle une femme charmante“—”There’s what I call a charming woman”), and I’d assumed that Spyres had selected the second, which seems to me the more interesting, particularly when taken out of context. But he sings the first, whose range would not in itself be a challenge were it not set in so speech-related a manner and at such restrained dynamics. Spyres deals with it easily and with a fine linguistic touch, but it doesn’t really register. A little more masculine erotic affect needs to peek through all the refined gestures, and as Kenneth Furie, my friend and colleague from back in the High Fidelity years, pointed out in his observant chapter on L’Heure in the Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera, it’s not a good idea to follow too literally the composer’s injunction that the music should be more spoken than sung.

Apart from the “Largo al factotum” (which after all has been sung by many a baritone, from Armand Crabbé to André Baugé to Gino Quilico, whose voices were light in gauge), the categories I have so far not addressed are those of the “real” E-19 baritone and tenor. And without launching an essay on the topic (that would require a Charles Rosen-ish book called The E-19 Style), I do feel constrained to point out that the 19th-Century changes in dominant categories of vocality involved a great deal more than increased loudness to compete with bigger orchestras playing on evolving instruments (cited by Spyres as the principal reason for the baritenor’s démodé status, and accurately enough, so far as that takes us), and the tuning of same. The new set of balances and tensions built into the voices themselves—all voices, though the emergence of the modern dramatic tenor and baritone ones were certainly key—expanded singing’s emotional range and shifted the primary mode of expression from the ornamental to the prismatic. The great singers of the E-19 era were those able to take advantage of this new state of being to sweep away their audiences with not so much a new technique as a new physical condition, whose vocal expression wasn’t only sensorily arousing (though certainly that), but which seemed more emotionally direct, ergo “true.” That condition is the pre-requisite for E-19 artistic craft.

In his most baritonal identity, Spyres sings through “Il balen” smoothly and “without incident;” it’s pleasing. He displays excellent poise on the breath, but uses it to purl forth ongoing metaphrases, rather than to seek out the most eloquent rhetorical choices. Since the tessitura holds no terrors for him, he can’t hold us in its suspenseful moments of anticipation and release. It would have been intriguing, with chorus already on hand, if he and his team had gone ahead with what amounts to the aria’s cabaletta—”Per me ora fatale” would have shown us how the voice holds up under those stressed Fs and G-flats, and “No, no, non può,” etc., whether or not it can produce a tensile mezza-voce in midrange. A little farther along (the sequence is laid out chronologically by composer birthdate), Spyres tackles the Pagliacci Prologue. He again sings most of it with attractive tone, correct pronuncia, and with a general awareness of its musical style. But it is lacking in any vividness of characterization, so we miss not only the effects that would come “naturally” to a fully developed verismo baritone voice, but those an imaginative artist of lesser means might provide in partial compensation. The A-flat and G at the close aren’t in trouble, but they aren’t satisfying, either—the combination of timbre and weight that can serve for the climactic bars of the Méhul and Spontini arias doesn’t do the job here.