Lisette Oropesa is the Elvira of this production. She brings a lovely timbre, a good grasp of style, an attractive physical presence, and a perky energy to her work on the role. People I’ve spoken with who know her singing better than I (I’ve seen her several times, but not in a part of this scope—I loved her Nannetta) have expressed some concern with the top of her voice, and it’s true that the sopracuti notes (all interpolations—nothing above the high D-flat is written, and that not sustained,^(I)sounded inconsistent, sometimes ragged, and that several a bit lower down emerged briefly as straight, without interpretive intent that I could detect. When I respond that a voice of this limited size and span should not really be undertaking this role, the knowledgeable answer is that Elvira was often sung by light, pure “coloratura” sopranos in times gone by. My thoughts on that are that, first, that was not always the case, and, second, that when it is true, those lighter voices were structured quite differently from the ones we’re hearing now. There is also the fact that so many of the earlier sopranos, starting with Adelina Patti (the earliest of whom we have any recorded evidence, and that extremely limited, though informative), began singing at what to us seems an improbably early age (Patti made her debut at 16, as Lucia, and sang Elvira often in the early years of her career), and were often retired, or on the verge of retirement, by Oropesa’s present age.

So the age factor, with so many sopranos (and singers of other voice types, too) having begun their careers so young (and their training, often including childhood singing, even earlier), is surely of some significance. From these early beginnings, especially among singers of Mediterranean origin, emerged a particular sound, and the sound in turn emerged from a particular structuring, or framing, of the instrument, whose aesthetics were incorporated into the training and then became a model for Italian composers in their writing for many soprano characters. In Opera as Opera, I posit that the outstanding characteristics of these voices were an overall brightness of timbre, leanness of focus, and tautness of position, relative to the darker, plumper, and looser voices that began to predominate in the postwar period. The observation applies to voices of all ranges and calibrations, male and female, but here we are listening to sopranos of less than dramatic format, the sorts who might essay Elvira, and we must not mistake the absence of a lusher, more rounded tone for smallness of voice.