In production conditions like these, the remnants of hope now lie with the possibility that two or three of the principal singers may take charge and transcend the boundaries drawn up for them by the Interpreters in Chief. But for starters, the cast had to contend with health issues. Piotr Beczała and Dmitry Belosselsky (Radames and Ramfis, respectively) had struggled through illness at the premiere, and were unavailable. Evidently, there was no backup on hand for our tenor hero that the company deemed battle-ready, ^(I)so SeokJong Baek was brought in from Phoenix, where he’d been rehearsing with the Arizona Opera, to take on Radames. Morris Robinson, who had been singing the King, moved over to Ramfis, and Harold Robbins stepped into Robinson’s vacated role. Baek sang well with a bright, open lyric tenor voice—steady tone of attractive quality, excellent intonation, and a command of some effective dynamic shadings. He seemed unacquainted with the uses of portamento to give the line shape and a strong sense of destination, but he sang a decent legato of the direct note-to-note sort. Roles I can imagine suiting him well at the Met: Nemorino and Ernesto, Fenton,^(II) Alfredo, perhaps Edgardo, and if he has florid fluency, Almaviva. Roles he has sung there to date: Ismaele, Calàf, Cavaradossi, and now Radames.

Playing opposite Baek was Angel Blue. There was an ironic undertone to her assumption of an assignment originally intended for the proscribed Anna Netrebko, over whose use of makeup for this part Blue had protested to the point of backing out of her own choice role of Violetta at the Arena di Verona in 2022. For that stand against “blackface” (a misapplication of that minstrelish term) she earned a measure of support from colleagues and other interested parties, but a tough-love talking-to from Grace Bumbry, of whom more below. And Bumbry was right: the purpose of makeup is credibility, upon which belief rests, and a social cause, however righteous, is not advanced by distorting art. In any case, here was Blue, whom I’d previously seen only in culturally black roles,^(III) tackling Aida. She was evenly matched with Baek, which is to say that she brought her attractive middleweight lyric soprano—strong toward the top, weak toward the bottom—to a part calling for a voice of spinto-to-dramatic format. She sang through it with sincerity and no serious mishaps, but without either the dynamic or timbral range that would have allowed her to go beyond the basic points. Whereas Baek responded to the staging’s neutrality and his underrehearsed status with a generalized, arms-akimbo energy, she opted for a modest, almost passive fulfillment of the blocking requirements.