The conducting and playing: I’ve written often enough on the subject of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the current condition of his Met orchestra. They can sound quite pretty, and make some pianissimo effects with great refinement. They can get suddenly, disproportionately loud, a little like Davidsen’s strong acuti emerging from insufficient preparation, as with those great full-orchestra outbursts followed by pp string-only echoes, four times repeated, as the mortally wounded Leonora staggers back onstage and Alvaro curses God’s vengeance. You won’t catch them unobservant of markings or sloppy with notes. You also won’t catch them really digging into phrases or gripping us with the suspense of an ongoing dramatic situation. So in scores like this one, under their Music Director, they produce a neat facsimile of a realization. Of course, they are so often reduced, as here, to background status that making a full commitment must seem futile.

Productions like those of Tcherniakov, Stone, Warlikowski, McBurney, Trelinski, and many others of course vary in their particularities, and can be argued over on their account, according to taste. But: either one believes that interpretation’s role is to consummate the creator’s vision, or not. One either believes in integrated production, in which all elements are in agreement with one another and with the text, or not. One either believes in seeking out the value system inherent in a work’s given world (in hope of learning something of what’s different, what’s not, from our own), or in replacing that system with our own, and thereby learning nothing. Those are really the only choices worth noting.

Three recommendations to add to those of the earlier posts: 

In the Met broadcast performance of 3/20/54, featuring several of the principals of the ’53 New Orleans performance I cited then, the tenor is Gino Penno. The first of the two CDs on my Myto set is defective, so I can report on only the latter half of Penno’s Alvaro. He was clearly an erratic singer, in fine form on the Cetra Ernani, but not on the ’52 Scala Macbeth with Callas. His career was short. But when he was in good voice, he was the most exciting and interesting Italian dramatic tenor of the postwar decade, the instrument comparable in size, quality, and attack to Del Monaco’s or Corelli’s, with command of an unusual but well-controlled mezza voce, and with an even more unusual subtlety of interpretation that doesn’t sound calculated. The conductor here is Fritz Stiedry, reminding us of what a solid maestro he was and how well the orchestra responded to him until his hearing began to fail.

In search of a Pereda ballad that captures its con eleganza in a capacious, greatvoiced reading: the applause that greets Leonard Warren on his Act 3 entrance in this same ’54 Met broadcast reminds us that throughout his long career in that house he got to be Pereda only a few times, in the early ’40s, following Tibbett—thereafter, the Inn Scene was left out. But it’s included on the ’58 RCA studio recording, and there Warren sings the aria (and the rest of the scene) with an exemplary combination of timbral and dynamic expansiveness, of dramatic calibre and the particular kind of polish his own unique mezza-voce made possible. He ends with the high A, too—a different animal than Prey’s.