In place of Luisi (” . . . has some bone, strong, clear, structurally good. Well above current average,” read my 2012 notes), this revival has given us Carlo Rizzi, by now a veteran with the house, in more or less the default position in Italian repertory that maestros like Fausto Cleva, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, or Nello Santi once occupied. He and the orchestra are certainly on familiar terms. In my experience, he has led performances that are neat enough and that move along; he doesn’t let the music droop. But I’ve often felt a lack of expansiveness and of rubato in his readings, and a thinning-out of sonority, though that’s increasingly hard to distinguish from the overall state of the orchestra. All these things were true of the Ballo. Of the three female principals, two were replacements for the originally announced singers: Angela Meade (for Elena Stikhina, as Amelia) and Liv Redpath (for Nina Minasyan, as Oscar). Meade has the vocal material for this and other Verdi roles—she showed high promise in her Caramoor Norma twelve years back—but she did not sing well on this occasion. She started poorly in the Ulrica scene, gusty and ill-tuned, and though she gradually improved through to a solidly vocalized “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” her singing never took on the consistent, firm guidance of line or expressive sheen one hoped for. In addition, her size and lack of mobility, exacerbated by her costuming, made it difficult for her to even execute basic movement requirements, let alone animate her role as an actress.^(I) One cuts some slack for Liv Redpath, making her Met debut scampering about with wings on and trippin’ the old top-hat and cane bit while dramatically detached from her character’s circumstances and too hemmed-in musically to do anything much with her delicious songs. (Her own coping mechanism, summed up in a Young Artist interview in Opera: “You have to sell yourself on what it is.” Exactly so, and that’s a perfect description of how to stay afloat in the auteurial tides.) Her singing didn’t have sufficient flash and bite to give the role its optimum sassy brilliance, but the voice is an attractive light soprano, and she executed her up-tempo, ornamental line satisfactorily. She’s been doing Lucias and Zerbinettas, so I assume there’s more tucked away. Olesya Petrova, also unhelpfully got up and situated (the scene had all the atmosphere of a Lower East Side storefront fortune-telling parlor in an abandoned building) and without either the scary boominess of the Zajick/Blythe sort or quite the vocal and stylistic authority of earlier Italian or Northern European models, handled it all with aplomb and sang reliably.