As we’d expect, Kaufmann is solid. His technical “conversion” has held up remarkably well in terms of reliable balance and steadiness of tone, and that merits professional admiration, whether one unreservedly loves the resulting tonal properties or not. The upper range has more tenorial brilliance in this music than in Otello’s, though never the free ring of a well set-up Italian voice—the dominant timbre remains a grey-ish baritenor one. In “Celeste Aida” and the Tomb Scene, there is a fair amount of the faux mezza-voce he urges his critics to not discount on grounds of unmanliness, along with a couple of B-flats that really are mezza-voce. He’s never in trouble in the course of this challenging role, but as so often in his work, especially since he has moved into the repertoire’s heaviest parts, there seems a reluctance to take emotional risks for the sake of preserving his equilibrium. His co-protagonist is Anja Harteros, a frequent partner at their home house in Munich. She is an emotionally engaged artist, unafraid of excitability, who clearly wants to pull us into her character’s situation and is resourceful in her search to do so, despite some vocal limitations. But this is yet another soprano voice overbalanced toward the top—or, more accurately, underbalanced toward the bottom, with nearly nothing in the way of chest voice development and integration into the range. So in her (many) excitable moments, the middle octave or so of her compass is frequently vague in pitch and frayed in quality. While the upper notes have strong presence at forte, the absence of a tensile messa di voce forces her to seek out shadings and variations of vibrato that are clever, but outside the stylistic frame. Though one feels on her side, the results are intermittent.

Ludovic Tézier is the Amonasro. While both his voice and musical temperament sound to be much more of the Germont/Valentin type than that of the Italian dramatic baritone, the warmth of his timbre is unfuzzy, and he sings with an agreeable consistency of line and vibrato. Erwin Schrott is a capable, overly amiable-sounding Ramfis. Marco Spotti has the core and bite that are desirable for the King, but for some reason resorts too often to a straight tone when declaiming—which is what the King does most of the time.

˜ ˜ ˜

As we move back to the Met broadcast of February 25, 1967, we must understand that we are in a different operatic cosmos. With the exception of the King (Louis Sgarro, the default Pharaoh of those years), every principal voice is of a size and quality better matched with the demands of his or her role than those of the two performances just considered. I feel secure in testifying to this, inasmuch as I saw, and wrote about, all these singers in these and other major roles on numerous occasions, though not on this particular afternoon. So we are evaluating from a different base line, or norm, and the reservations entered are of the sort we felt free to make, secure in the belief that that base line represented the minimum that one had a right to expect of opera performances on the “world-class” level. And when it comes to reservations, this performance would have given us plenty to work with, critically speaking. So I’ll pretend I’m back in that cosmos, once again reviewing a by no means out-of-the-ordinary performance of Aida. Just understand that the context is not the same.