The Traviata suffered from the outset from the same lassitude from pit and podium that had afflicted the Onegin, and in a score with none of the temptations to passivity as inhabit Tchaikovsky’s. The playing was clean, the tempi sensible, and the emotional vitality, any impulse to dig into the music for its dramatic intentions or even its decorative excitements, simply not there past the entry level. That was disappointing, in that the evening’s conductor, Marco Armiliato, has in the past enlivened some of the standard-rep Italian scores. Among the principals, it was the baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat that whetted my curiosity ahead of time; I’d read and heard reports of a genuine Verdi baritone of a sort we haven’t heard for several decades. And indeed, the components of such an instrument—the amplitude and basic timbral rightness of tone—are present, and he is capable of some dynamic shading, as well. But in the legato passages that make up most of Germont’s writing, most damagingly in “Di Provenza,” he compromised the line with a great deal of straight-toned sloughing through, and in the more proclamatory moments  (“No, generosa, vivere”; “Di più non lacerarmi”; etc.) I could not detect any emotional drive behind the welcome size of the voice. As a physical presence, he animated nothing, simply walking on and off and hitting his marks. So despite the solid vocal foundation, there was little to evoke comparison with a Taddei, a Gobbi or Panerai, or any in our line of American baritones of the postwar period—Warren, Merrill, MacNeil, or the young Milnes, or a backup list that here in New York included Paolo Silveri, Giuseppe Valdengo, Enzo Mascherini, Mario Sereni, Frank Guarrera, and Renato Capecchi—to say nothing of such earlier exemplars as de Luca and Tibbett.

The Violetta in this string of performances (the third series of the season, with corresponding changes of conductor and in all the principal roles, twenty-one performances in all sprinkled through April, May, and the first week of June, edging out Bohème, with twenty, and Turandot, seventeen) was Rosa Feola. Her voice remains much as it was when I first heard her, as Gilda in Bartlett Sher’s ridiculous Weimar-era Rigoletto (see “Ich bin ein Berliner” (1/28/22) and then as Olga in Fedora (see “Fedora!?,” 1/27/23). In the former, I described her as “stylistically well schooled and linguistically at home,” with an “attractive lyric-coloratura soprano,” but with “little or no strength in the lower one-third of her range;” in the latter, I thought she “had the right attitudinal intentions” (it’s very much a character role), but with a voice that, though pretty, was “rather pallid in timbre and focus, lacking the pert edge needed.” If we apply these observations to the role of Violetta, where the needed “pert edge” becomes an assured brilliance of timbre and execution and the required strength in the lower range is far more urgent, we have the pluses and minuses approximately right. In the last act, she worked diligently and sincerely to capture the mortal moment and its related emotions, and caught a measure of them. (For some pertinent further reflections on this great role, see “The Lost One: Searching for a Standard for La Traviata,” 10/8/22.)