And it has certainly been the season of AI. When even our current administration shows a little blip of interest in the possibility of lite regulation, we know (as if we had not already known) that there are poisonous newborn beings lurking in dark corners. At a recent family gathering, I wondered aloud what AI and its offspring could do for opera. I had in mind such things as major reductions in staff (perhaps starting at the top?), the control of such tech as is not already automated, and the replacement of stagehands by robots. In other words, a wholesale elimination of most non-artistic jobs, and a leap forward in productivity, labor being by far the greatest expense of a performing arts organization. Those are things that AI could, quite realistically, achieve, at the mere cost of further dehumanization of the arts and brutal, but probably brief, confrontations with the tech unions. But one of my granddaughters, an energetic entrepreneuse, did a quick search, and it turns out that according to the oracle, the great benefits of AI lie not in economics, but in art. At the top of the list came such things as the completion of unfinished operas (so much for the likes of Franco Alfano or Friedrich Cerha ) and the crafting of libretti for new operas. Can the whole package, words and  music, be far behind?

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The two productions I’ll be discussing here are revivals of standard repertory operas, one a perennial presence, the other less often before us but no less a masterpiece. So neither qualifies as a special event of the season just concluded. But in fact, standard-repertory revivals make up not just a plurality, but a majority of the performances in a season—they are what most operagoers are, by choice, experiencing most of the time. The fact that the Met’s management constructs its schedule as it does demonstrates that, although most of these rep evenings and afternoons are on a per-performance basis less well attended than the special-occasion shows, and the company’s promotion and advertising efforts treat them as also-rans hardly worthy of mention, they remain the institution’s means of survival. They, and their ever-shifting wholesale changes of cast and conductor, call for critical scrutiny as urgently as any new opera or production.

The Onegin was certainly the more interesting of these performances, and not solely on the grounds of relative unfamiliarity. Of special advance interest was the Tatiana of Asmik Grigorian. It’s a role for which she is famous in Europe, and surely better suited to her voice than the likes of Turandot or Lady Macbeth, which she has undertaken at major venues over there, or even  Cio-Cio-San, her debut role here. (See Butterfly Revived. Carmen, Not., 5/14/24.) As I wrote of her Butterfly, much of her appeal lies in the realm of what we usually call acting—that is, of the physical variety—and Tatiana is one of the most responsive of soprano parts in that regard. Grigorian’s Letter Scene was the best-acted I have seen, in the moment-to-moment, internally generated manner that was soon to take  hold—and particularly in Russia—at the time of this opera’s premiere, and for which this extended monologue is the model scene. She followed this wonderful character’s arc with the same sort of commitment and specificity from beginning to end, and that was absorbing to watch. All these instincts, this craft, were in operation with respect to her vocal interpretation, too. But there, she is more limited, as I suggested in my Butterfly comments, by the narrow coloristic span and modest lower-register development of her voice. And the Met is a big house.