I also had some hope for Tomasz Konieczny’s Kurwenal. As I’ve previously noted, he’s no bass-baritone (as he’s listed), but a high, bright baritone, the voice lying well across Kurwenal’s tessitura. He’s also a lively theatrical presence, and while his Mandryka earlier this season hadn’t enough sheer beauty of tone to make his interpretation memorable, I had respected his efforts with it, both musically and dramatically. But this wasn’t good. It was loud (and he spent Act 3 down by the table, which made it even louder), but brutally punched out, with nothing but roughness in music that often turns eloquently in other directions. At the sighting of Isolde’s ship, he dispensed a naturalistic chuckle, as if acknowledging someone’s joke. Ekaterina Gubanova’s Brangäne was an almost total loss, the voice weak, unsteady, poorly supported. Ryan Speedo Green was the König Marke. He is a bass-baritone, and thus has not quite the gravity of tone and easily seated low notes that are satisfying in this music. But it’s a decent voice of light-heavyweight calibration, and he seemed more in touch with this idiom than he had with Escamillo’s in last season’s calamitous Carmen. He is projected as the Wotan of the upcoming Ring.

I have not mentioned the Met’s orchestra, or the evening’s conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whose work would be of fundamental importance in any actual interpretation of this opera, but who only constitute the soundtrack for the installation. In his New Yorker review, Alex Ross complained that with so much going on visually, it was hard to know where to look. Certainly true, but what is of greater importance is that it was hard to know when one had permission to listen, the answer being “never,” not even during the magnificent preludes to Acts 1 and 3. Keep staring in free-floating wonderment, and don’t bother with the soundtrack. One of my neighbors in Balcony Row A on the evening of March 25th, each of us unbeknownst to the other, was Joshua Barone, not yet given the title of Chief Music Critic of the NYT (I suspect there will be none), but drawing most of the plumb operatic assignments. Reviewing the premiere, he had waxed effusive over the singers, most of all Davidsen—one would have thought that Flagstad and Melchior, or Nilsson and Vickers, were holding forth—only to be the target of an unusual volume of protests from vocally tuned-in devotees. So he dutifully returned, but this time upstairs, thinking his press seat location might have something to do with it. It did. “Best seat in the house”—but that was then, when we had a collection of greatvoiced singers whose merits and faults we could debate but whose basic sound tuned well to the hall and reached full bloom in this top tier, and when the orchestra did not need to be restrained on their behalf. (It’s because that upper fifth in Davidsen’s voice does evoke some of that effect that she is mistaken for a great dramatic soprano.) On recent occasions when I’ve returned to the orchestra level, I’ve noticed that yes, it’s better to be close to these singers, if only to get more eye-confirmation of their work. But the thrill of a truly resounding voice of quality heard over a melded orchestral sound from an acoustically favorable location is no longer available, and the flip side of that is that voices that don’t resound fall to earth before they reach us. Barone conceded the point, but then walked it back by claiming that when Davidsen and Spyres came down (briefly) from the tunnel to the table, their heroic stature was restored. Well, it was a little better.