As Alfredo, we had an Armenian tenor, Liparit Avetisyan, who’d made his company debut with it a couple of weeks before my performance. The part, despite its leading-tenor status, often registers as a third wheel in this opera, though it needn’t—as recently as Jonas Kaufmann and, lest we forget, Rolando Villazon, we have had Alfredos who (briefly) realized the starring potential of the role. Avetisyan proved to be another in the line of young lyric tenors who sing clearly, with a pleasing quality, reasonable security and balance, and behave themselves onstage, without quite rising to that level. For the curious tenor devotee: one verse of “O mio rimorso,” no high C.

If we ask whether these principals upheld what we considered the standard international level of middle-Verdi singing and interpretation sixty or more years ago, the answer would be that only Feola came close. (As with Germont, the lists are extended. For Alfredo, in the ’50s alone we had Di Stefano, Tagliavini, Prandelli, Campora, and Labò joining the homegrown sturdies Peerce and Tucker. Among Violettas: Albanese, Steber, Moffo, Tebaldi, Callas, and within two years, Sutherland; over at the New York City Opera, Beverly Sills and Patricia Brooks.) If we inquire further as to some special bonding of physical and vocal interpretation (a shorter list), or further yet into performances that pull us into a specific character in a specific time-and-place social setting, we’re down to Callas and Brooks, and with much owing to directorial guidance in both cases. I cite these precedents not from nostalgic recollection (though of course I have that), but from my sense of a critic’s responsibility to keep a standard before us. Things have changed, a lot, and grading on a curve will serve no better here than it has in the wide sectors of our educational system that have adopted it.  This production, originally directed by Michael Mayer and restaged by Jonathon Loy, was filled with exactly the nonsensical and sometimes comical crossings and generalized, indicated behavior that the Onegin at least avoided, and featured (an appropriate word in this instance) the worst single gesture of Personenregie I can recall seeing: Mlle. Germont, Alfredo’s sister and Giorgio’s daughter, was made to materialize from nowhere (well, backstage) at “Pura siccome un angelo” and stand on display as if being auctioned. She exited when things got more complicated, but later flitted across the scene in, I surmised, wedding regalia. Enough.

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NEXT TIME: Unless there’s a seasonal surprise, which at this point I don’t anticipate, these posts will resume with the first reports of the 2026-27 season in the fall, on a date to be announced. A restorative summer to all.

CLO

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