Musical: She’s always doing her best to stay faithful to text, and her temperamental/linguistic identity is much better suited to German music of any sort than to Italian. So there’s a basic affinity with this writing, as attested to by her early success with it. She’s limited, of course, by the vocal configuration just described, and that has to account in part for what often seems a lack of interpretive adventurousness. There’s never anything willful or tasteless—or idiosyncratic or surprising. Dramatic: The last comments apply here, too. She is a well set-up woman with a pleasing, though hardly riveting, presence, and her acting, of both voice and body, avoids anything offensive or foolish. But it seems more obedient and co-operative than individually insightful, more decided-upon than emotionally impelled. It is only fair to observe that with the exception of the Trelinski/Nézet-Séguin Forza (an inauspicious coming-together of elements for her), all her appearances here, including this one, have been in repertory revivals, where the pressure is to fit in, not to burst out of the comfort zone. I’ll enter a few more remarks on her performance when discussing the direction, below.

The most encouraging news from the rest of the cast is that after several seasons of baffling vocal withdrawal, the world-class bass voice of René Pape, if not quite restored to its plenteous state of a decade and more ago, has at least returned to easy audibility, and produced a pleasurable Rocco of the more genial sort (no room here for the gold-grasping temperament that is sometimes discovered in this role and that of Daland), and that this companionable singing was nicely complemented by his physical acting. Thinking back to his entertaining Leporello, one can see some good years ahead for him in a new range of roles. There was also a solid Don Fernando from Stephen Milling. As Florestan we had the English tenor David Butt Phillip, who has essayed the fierce Strauss parts (Apollo, Bacchus, the Kaiser), as well as some of the more “normal” repertory, with evident success. He began with an impressively sustained crescendo (of that G on “Gott!“), from half-voice to an ample-enough forte, and then preserved his vocal poise through the notorious aria and the remainder of the role. His voice has tonal clarity and picks up some ring on its smooth traversal of the passaggio; it also shows occasional tremulousness on long-held notes. Given the alternatives, he was certainly a more than acceptable Florestan, and I’d be interested to hear him in one of the Jugendlich Wagnerian parts.

Tomasz Konieczny took on the role of Pizarro, which is properly if anachronistically classed as Heldenbariton—”Bariton(Bass”),” hedges my old Peters score—and Konieczny has been consistently cast that way in his appearances here, which have even included the Holländer. But, as I noted after hearing his Abimélech and his Siegfried Alberich (see Siegfried at the Met, 5/24/19), his voice is more correctly described as a strong, high-set character baritone, and Pizarro lies low for him to do anything with except rant in a monochromatic blare. He does so securely, but the darker, more authoritative tone implicit in the writing is absent. He is scheduled for Kurwenal next season, and that will suit his voice’s structure better, if he can summon some real singing tone. Finally, we have our Marzelline/Jaquino pairing. They would remain the comic second couple of Singspiel/operetta/musical comedy usage were it not that Marzelline crosses over into First Couple territory and complicates the action of the serious, potentially tragic central plot. She has her own song, leads off the Canon Quartet, must carry a strong line in the Act 1 trio with Leonore and Rocco, and sound the alarm on Pizarro’s return. After enjoying Ying Fang’s Zerlina two seasons ago, I’d looked forward to hearing and seeing her in this part, but she retreated to the generic prettiness that I’d heard in her Ilia. Perhaps she was in search of Mozartean nuance (but her voice is too light for that—she must sing out at full tilt to leave a mark), and/or possibly she needs a sharper spur from director or conductor to assert her personality. A German tenor, Magnus Dietrich, made his Met debut as Jaquino. I guess we can say that his voice was well matched with Fang’s, which means, given the role’s limited scope, that he made only a slight impression. The company could certainly use a gifted comprimario or two, if his talents incline in that direction.