During the 1950s and 1960s, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier was frequently performed at the Metropolitan Opera featuring some of the era’s biggest superstars. However, the opera has been seen less frequently the past few decades due to the lack of genuinely dramatic voices needed to do justice to the opera’s three demanding leading roles. The Met’s current revival, its first in nearly a dozen years, features an attractive, HD-ready cast that only sporadically rises to the occasion.

Based on a true story, Giordano’s 1896 Chénier with a libretto by Luigi Illica (co-author with Giuseppe Giacosa of the text for La Bohème which premiered the same year) embraces some of the ideals of verismo opera in its lushly accompanied emotional arias and duets, though its lovers come from a higher social class than those featured in well-known works by Puccini, Mascagni and Leoncavallo. The poet son of a diplomat, the real André Chénier (1762-1794) became entangled in the French Revolution and was executed just three days before the Reign of Terror ended. Maddalena de Coigny, his fictional operatic lover, is the daughter of a Countess; she is also pursued by Carlo Gérard, one of her mother’s servants who eventually rises to become a Revolutionary leader. The three form a fraught triangle whose vicissitudes are examined in vibrantly soaring music that may ultimately lack the memorably melodic inspiration of other more affecting verismo operas.

Though it demands three larger-than-life singing actors, the opera is most often embraced as one of the most sought-after spinto tenor vehicles. Throughout the Met’s prime mid-century years under Rudolf Bing, Chénier became a frequent golden-age showcase for Mario Del Monaco, Richard Tucker, Franco Corelli and Carlo Bergonzi in the title role with Zinka Milanov, Renata Tebaldi or Eileen Farrell as Maddalena, while Gérard was frequently played by Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill or Ettore Bastianini.

The Met’s current Chénier by Nicolas Joël with simple though evocative sets and costumes by Hubert Monloup premiered in April 1996 as the last new production mounted for Luciano Pavarotti who played the title role in his final full-length Met opera telecast. Inevitably he was followed by Plácido Domingo (who in 2002 at age 61 was roundly criticized for transposing down much of the poet’s music), then by Ben Heppner.

This season’s revival no doubt happened because local favorite Piotr Beczala took on the title role for the first time this summer in a concert performance at the Salzburg Festival. Beczala, who had notable successes during the Met’s 2022-23 season starring in new productions of both Giordano’s Fedora and Wagner’s Lohengrin, has however had a rocky time at Lincoln Center since then. Illness kept the Polish tenor from singing the premiere of Carrie Cracknell’s controversial new Carmen, while during the following New Year’s Eve gala he foolhardily soldiered on through a disastrous Radames in the new Michael Mayer Aida.

The tenor who turns 59 on December 28 has lately been taking on roles like Radames and Turandot’s Calaf that many consider too heavy for his big lyric voice. Chénier too asks for a spinto tenor and, on opening night, Beczala, while dramatically blank, sounded healthy but tossed off his show-stopping music in an uncomfortably loud and unsubtle way. His arias, particularly the “Improvviso” and “Come un bel dì di maggio,” call for a more nuanced and poetic approach than we heard in Beczala’s strained and driven renditions.

As his nemesis Gérard, Igor Golovatenko, on the other hand, showed he at least had the real vocal goods. In his opening aria in which he dotes on his boss’s unavailable daughter, the Russian baritone sang with exciting, theater-filling ardor and brought a sympathetic intensity to his ill-fated pursuit of Maddalena. Golovatenko’s ringing big aria “Nemico della patria” was suffused with compulsive, tortured intent and was deservedly rewarded with the premiere’s hardiest ovation. Gérard proved to be the baritone’s most successful Met portrayal to date, especially after his ineffectual Prince Yeletsky in last season’s Queen of Spades.

Though dominated by the Chénier-Maddalena-Gérard triangle, Giordano’s opera is also unusually replete with vivid character roles which give their respective performers a chance to shine. Nancy Fabiola Herrera’s plush Countess di Coigny memorably made much of her haughty grandeur. While Alexander Birch Elliott sounded great despite Joël’s hopelessly dated effeminate depiction of Fléville. Though Siphokazi Molteno’s Bersi was visually sparkling, her slim mezzo was frequently covered by Daniele Rustioni’s bustling orchestra. Debuting, Guriy Gurev made a pleasant enough impression as Roucher, while Maurizio Muraro, usually cast in buffo roles, was genuinely frightening as Mathieu though a big exposed high note defeated him. Brenton Ryan’s refreshingly young Incredibile may have lacked some of its needed oiliness, while Olesya Petrova brought her sumptuous mezzo to an arresting cameo as the blind Madelon.

And what of Chénier’s leading lady? Three years ago, Sonya Yoncheva exuded a stylish intensity to Giordano’s Fedora; however, her following Met assignment in Bellini’s Norma found the soprano in way over her head, and she fled after the fourth performance. A sympathetic Lisa in Queen of Spades earlier this year brought hope that she’d conquered some nagging vocal issues, but, unfortunately, Maddalena exposed once again her maddening tendency to take on heavy roles beyond her capabilities.

While she brought a youthful ebullience to the first act’s young Maddalena, the following three acts require the kind of hearty spinto outpourings that exposed Yoncheva’s wobbly, thinning high notes and persistent intonation difficulties. Though her restless beauty made its effect during the brutal third-act encounter with Gérard, her distressing rendition of the beloved “La mamma morta” aria varied so wildly from phrase to phrase that one had no idea what would come next.

The demanding exertions of “Vicino a te”—the duet with Chénier as they march toward the guillotine—found Yoncheva nearly depleted though she blasted out a big final high note—was it a B or a slightly lowered B-flat? The soprano’s inadequacies throughout the evening aroused grave reservations about her upcoming Met debut as Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly.

Though this season he has also led performances of Don Giovanni and La Bohème as the Met’s new principal guest conductor, Rustioni made his boldest statement yet with Chénier, a particular favorite of his which he recently led to great acclaim in Lyon and Paris (with a completely different, more suitable cast). Rustioni was fascinating to watch as he uncovered delightful felicities in Giordano’s orchestral writing. But, as with Molteno, he sometimes let his vibrantly lush orchestra overwhelm the singers though Beczala and Golovatenko coped best. The conductor demonstrated his great love for Chénier, though unfortunately he had to make do with his less-than-optimal tenor and soprano.

Perhaps the pair will arrive with greater security to the run’s sixth and final performance, which will be shown in HD in theaters worldwide on December 13.

No U.S. performing arts institution has ever faced the firestorm of controversy and criticism that has enveloped the John F. Kennedy Center since earlier this year! Soon after Trump’s inauguration, the re-elected President was selected as board chair of the Center by a group newly appointed by him. Dismissals and resignations abounded as a dramatic “rebranding” of the District of Columbia’s prime entertainment complex was put into motion.

Reports eventually surfaced that the takeover caused ticket sales and charitable contributions to plummet, and most recently, long-planned performances have been canceled or postponed to accommodate the 2026 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup Draw taking place on December 6. A controversial agreement related to the soccer event has sparked a congressional investigation, alleging corruption and cronyism.

I was curious how the Washington National Opera, one of the Center’s prime constituents, was being affected by the upheaval. I hadn’t attended a performance by the Washington National Opera since 2018, and when I mentioned I was going to the Kennedy Center for Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, I was met with surprise and dismay. Many opera lovers have declared that they will no longer visit the venue due to recent governmental interference. WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello strongly addressed this attitude in a recent interview with Parterre Box in which she proclaimed, “By boycotting us, you are killing art!”

When I arrived at the final Nozze performance on November 22 (coincidentally the 64th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy), I expected to survey empty rows and a smallish crowd of demoralized opera-goers. Instead, the Kennedy Center’s Opera House was filled with an excited, quite dressy (as compared to a typical Saturday night Met crowd) bunch, audibly eager for Mozart. When buoyant WNO General Director Timothy O’Leary stepped in front of the curtain to make a pre-performance comment, I scanned the theater’s Orchestra section around me and saw nary an empty seat. O’Leary referred obliquely to the Center’s current fraught circumstances when he remarked that everyone these days needs a comedy (cue rousing applause), and Peter Kazaras’s antic, inventively detailed Nozze production—abetted by jokey colloquial projected English titles—delivered that in spades.

Never have I attended a Nozze performance that elicited so many hearty laughs. While Kazaras’s smart direction may have given short shrift to the danger and darkness simmering in Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto of class tensions in 18th-century Spain, his eager cast brimmed with infectious energy, delightfully accompanied by Robert Spano in his first outing as the WNO’s new Music Director.

Scanning the program, I had many questions: would Rosa Feola, such a winning Susanna at the Met last spring, make a wise transition to the Countess? Would Joélle Harvey, justly acclaimed as a concert singer, command the stage savvy needed for the mercurial Susanna, and would Le Bu, a budding Wagnerian, also be suited to Mozart as her wily Figaro? Was the Kennedy Center’s recent prohibition on drag shows the reason a male countertenor was cast as the horny teenage boy Cherubino rather than the usual female mezzo soprano en travesti?

I needn’t have worried, as all the participants were as consistently strong as any I’ve ever encountered. Even the smallest roles were cast with unusual care: sputtering helplessly in his wheelchair, Hakeem Henderson created a hilarious cameo as Don Curzio, while Kevin Thompson’s deliciously soused Antonio heaped scorn on whoever trampled his affectionately tended garden. Beloved veteran Sir Willard White made his WNO debut at 78 as an outraged Bartolo who swiftly melted when he learned Figaro was his long-lost son.

Will Liverman’s Count Almaviva was sung with an almost frightening intensity, perhaps too much so that it was difficult to comprehend the Countess’s forgiveness of such an unsympathetic creature. Feola’s shimmering soprano made her aching “Porgi amor” and hopeful “Dove sono” among the evening’s vocal highlights while enacting a more than usually self-possessed Countess.

Feola blended divinely with her Susanna in their Letter Duet, a quiet interlude for the boundlessly energetic Harvey whose glowingly crystalline soprano tirelessly ruled the chaotic Almaviva household. As her besotted husband-to-be, Le revealed an unusually big and bold bass-baritone as Figaro; his elegantly tall servant proved an amusing counterpart to Liverman’s Napoleon Complex-riddled Count.

The potential stunt casting of countertenor John Holiday as Cherubino proved to be a smashing success as he ably embodied the randy page while singing with suave élan, including a particularly lovely “Voi che sapete.”

WNO’s utterly winning Nozze represented a compelling argument for the continued existence of a company whose finances have reportedly suffered so much so that next season may well be facing a crippling shortfall. Reports vary as to the company’s continued presence at the Kennedy Center with some believing that WNO is investigating moving to another D.C. location, possibly the vast DAR Constitution Hall or George Washington University’s more intimate Lisner Auditorium where the night after Nozze the increasingly valuable Washington Concert Opera opened its season with Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, a seminal French work which premiered twelve years before Mozart’s masterpiece.

New York City used to be the world’s capital for concert opera, a genre that affords eager audiences the opportunity to hear rare works performed—but without sets and costumes. After the demise in the early 1970s of the American Opera Society, Opera Orchestra of New York (under the leadership of conductor Eve Queler) took up its mission of offering starry casts in unusual repertoire. However, since OONY ceased operations in 2016, concert operas now occur only occasionally in New York, while WCO, founded in 1986 by Stephen Crout, marches on, now consistently presenting three works each season.

Iphigénie was likely chosen to showcase mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey, who has starred in previous WCO presentations of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed I Montecchi, Donizetti’s La Favorita, Gounod’s Sapho, and most recently in the Berlioz version of Gluck’s Orphée ed Eurydice. As WCO’s reigning prima donna, Lindsey must have been eager to perform Gluck’s haunted heroine, a role she had been scheduled to premiere at the Met during its pandemic-canceled 2020-2021 season.

When I heard Lindsay at the Met three years ago as Idamante in Mozart’s Idomeneo, she often sounded small-scaled in that large house. However, at Lisner (a third the size of the Met), her plush mezzo rang out securely in Gluck’s most demanding soaring lines, though in declamatory passages her bland French failed to register compellingly. Lindsey cannily delineated the warring sides of the displaced daughter of Agamemnon, who was rescued from her ordained sacrifice by the goddess Diana. As the priestess of Tauris, she forthrightly related her disturbing dream, which depicted the murder of her father by her brother Oreste, then Lindsey movingly lamented her family’s cursed fate in the opera’s most famous aria, “O malheureuse Iphigénie,” which Gluck lifted from an earlier Italian opera, his setting of La Clemenza di Tito. However, Lindsey’s performance, supported by the fine female chorus, while at times hauntingly lovely, verged on mannered with exaggerated soft dynamics.

In the past, concert operas nearly always featured a line of singers, in front of the orchestra and chorus, standing behind their music stands when performing or seated when they were not. More recently, however, some performers, having memorized their music, have chosen to interact with each other as if onstage in an opera house. Unfortunately, with no director credited, WCO’s Iphigénie featured a confusing mélange of approaches. To the left of conductor Antony Walker, Lindsey and baritone John Moore, in the smallish role of Thoas, sang from their scores. However, to the maestro’s right, the two other scoreless principals—baritone Theo Hoffman and tenor Fran Daniel Lauceria as Oreste and Pylade, both of whom had recently performed their roles elsewhere—acted up a storm, fully inhabiting their roles. This bifurcated presentation may have sought to emphasize Iphigénie’s isolation, but instead it threw us out of the drama, causing us to wonder, perhaps unfairly, why the prima donna hadn’t memorized her music.

Hoffman and Lauceria movingly conveyed the strong bond between friends, one that leads each to offer to die so that the other might live. Hoffman’s colorful baritone registered strongly as Oreste, perhaps too strongly as his strenuous acting occasionally became excessively histrionic. Lauceria, with his piquant light tenor, presented a more agreeably recessive Pylade. Moore’s thunderous Thaos so energized the first act that one missed him until his brief, doomed reappearance in the final scene.

Walker’s polite conducting lacked the propulsive spark to enliven Gluck’s most inward and ascetic opera. His staid orchestra performed nicely enough but sounded thinnish, needing more strings. The most grievous blot on the performance was the wildly excessive amplification of the fortepiano. Its playing should emerge modestly from the orchestral texture, but instead the opera’s stormy prelude sounded like a piano concerto. The balance drastically disturbed the first act; though it became less jarring as the performance progressed, the amplification was never appropriately reduced. Walker may be more at home with WCO’s next offering—Bizet’s exotic Les Pêcheurs de Perles in March, but I fear the obtrusive fortepiano might return for Mozart’s Gluck-influenced Idomeneo in May.

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The Metropolitan Opera’s production style from the 1970s through the 1990s could best be described as lavishly (and expensively) realistic. Audiences enthusiastically applauded works luxuriously mounted by Franco Zeffirelli, who embraced primarily Italian opera, and Otto Schenk, who took care of German opera—most notably Wagner’s masterpieces. Since Peter Gelb took over in 2006, however, there’s been a determined shift toward a sparer, cheaper, more contemporary aesthetic, one that hasn’t always been welcomed by conservative Met audiences.

After Luc Bondy’s much-reviled Tosca, which replaced Zeffirelli’s, was dropped, Gelb admitted he will never drop the Italian director-designer’s beloved La Bohème and Turandot. The flop of Robert Lepage’s scandalously expensive Ring cycle likely also convinced the Met that it should cancel a provocative new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Stefan Herheim and instead revive Schenk’s 1993 version as well as his 1977 Tannhäuser. This season, after an absence of eleven years, November’s delicious revival of Richard Strauss’s Arabella again reminded audiences how much they miss Schenk, who died early this year at 94.

Arabella, which premiered in 1933, is the sixth and final work created by Strauss with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of opera’s most successful composer-librettist partnerships. Of their works that also include Elektra and Die Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella most resembles Der Rosenkavalier, another romantic comedy of manners playing out among the upper echelons of Viennese society. Count Waldner’s family, however, has suffered financial reverses and is desperately trying to hold on by finding a rich husband for Arabella, their eldest daughter. In a quirky Hofmannsthal twist, the younger daughter, Zdenka, has been introduced to all as a boy named Zdenko in a money-saving scheme.

In the first act, Strauss, who relished composing for female voices, gives one of his most ravishing duets to the soprano sisters who both yearn for “der Richtige” (the Right One), and by the opera’s end, after tragi-comic complications, both will find their ideal mate.

Later in the opera, Arabella duets with Mandryka, and they are among the most moving moments in all of Strauss. Although Arabella shares Der Rosenkavalier’s fondness for waltzes, it has never achieved the frequent repertoire status of its popular predecessor. Hofmannsthal’s prolix libretto features many trying pages of sumptuously accompanied stark parlando, helpfully translated by the Met’s back-of-the-seat titles.

A challenge for performances of Arabella remains finding the ideal soprano for its title role, an alluring beauty desired by all men but whose wise self-possession leads her to find her many suitors unworthy until she encounters Mandryka, an outsider with whom she instantly feels an unbreakable bond. The Met’s premiere production in the old house served as a showcase for notable Straussians Eleanor Steber and Lisa Della Casa. After an absence of nearly twenty years, the opera finally returned in 1983 in Schenk’s striking new production for Kiri Te Kanawa. Nearly two decades would pass before the company found its next “Right One”: Renée Fleming.

Subsequent Met revivals arrived without their originally planned soprano: by 2014, the elusive Anja Harteros had canceled all her U.S. appearances, and in her place we heard Malin Byström, while this season’s revival was planned for Lise Davidsen, who dropped out to care for twins born in June. In between feedings, she’s preparing her first Isolde, due in Barcelona in January, followed in March by Yuval Sharon’s new Met Tristan.

In Davidsen’s absence, the company turned to Rachel Willis-Sørense,n who in her first-ever Arabella gave the finest performance of her thus-far uneven Met career, which last season included a wayward Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. The first act found the American soprano still nervously finding her footing in the duet with Zdenka and her introspective monologue “Mein Elemer.” But when she entered the Coachman’s Ball resplendent in all white, the heretofore chilly Willis-Sørensen melted most winningly as she was introduced to Tomasz Konieczny as her Mandryka.

Her commanding Arabella clearly knew how to handle men, as we saw in touching farewells to her three unsuccessful suitors, whom the Met cast with special care, each making their Met debuts. Ben Brady suavely pivoted from September’s bravura Rossini in Philadelphia to November’s charming Strauss as Lamoral, while Ricardo José Rivera’s randy Dominik didn’t allow him to display the really impressive baritone we’ve experienced in Teatro Nuovo’s summer revivals.

Given the best opportunity of the three, Evan LeRoy Johnson nearly stole the show with a handsomely ringing tenor as Elemer. Strauss is kinder to him than to Matteo, Zdenka’s hoodwinked suitor, whose cruelly high music Pavol Breslik tackled with noticeable effort.

Best known for her Handel, English soprano Louise Alder made her highly successful Met debut as an achingly vulnerable Zdenka, dashing in her male garb while soaring with hidden love for the distracted Matteo. Young French soprano Julie Roset, in the evening’s fifth debut, happily made Fiakermilli’s fits of coloratura frivolity less annoying than they can be.

Who knew that Karen Cargill was such an accomplished comedienne? As the girls’s irrepressible mother Adelaide, the Scottish mezzo dithered and flirted with zest, leaving Brindley Sherratt, sonorous as her husband Waldner, to fuss and fume amusingly.

Like Willis-Sørensen, Konieczny found Mandryka a most congenial role, at least since his acclaimed debut as Alberich in 2019. Though his pungent, craggy bass-baritone could never be called beautiful, he readily took on his role’s punishingly high tessitura while his shyly determined courting of Arabella easily won over both her and the audience. His infatuation clearly brought out the best in Willis-Sørensen, whose voice bloomed as he forgave her alleged indiscretions and ended the evening in self-confident triumph as she exclaimed to her future husband: “I cannot help it. Take me as I am!”

Dylan Evans skillfully revived Schenk’s busy but pleasingly naturalistic staging, but the most popular stars of the revival were the dazzlingly detailed, stage-filling Cinemascope sets of the director’s frequent collaborator Günther Schneider-Siemssen, abetted by entrancing costumes by four-time Oscar winner Milena Canonero. Before both the first and second acts, nakedly inviting applause, the curtain rose in silence. Only after the grateful ovations did conductor Nicholas Carter begin Strauss’s bustling music. The Australian maestro who has been so impressive at the Met in Brett Dean’s Hamlet and Britten’s Peter Grimes drew superbly assured playing from his orchestra, though at times his brisk tempi rushed the singers, particularly Willis-Sørensen, who clearly wanted more leisure to savor Arabella’s grateful music.

The Met eschews an edition sanctioned by Strauss that eliminates one intermission by joining the second and third acts, which makes for a nearly four-hour opera. Nonetheless, this season’s fresh and vivid cast makes Arabella an especially entertaining enterprise, one that will be shown live in HD in theaters worldwide on 22 November.

Synchronicity between live performances and new recordings used to be quite common in classical music. Therefore, the October 17 opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of La Fille du Régiment preceded by the release of Pentatone’s Golden Age CD—both starring Erin Morley and Lawrence Brownlee—might seem a model of canny long-range planning. However, the singers confided to me that the recording’s genesis came well before the Donizetti comedy was on the Met’s schedule as one of this season’s bel canto highlights.

In April 2020, as a response to COVID-19 closing opera houses, the Met put together a live online “At-Home Gala” during which a dazzling collection of the biggest stars performed (often from their homes) for a worldwide audience. One particularly special segment featured Morley accompanying herself on the piano while singing an aria from La Fille du Régiment. I wondered if she had any inkling that she would be singing Marie at the Met five years later. Initially, she had hesitated to perform, but her father strongly encouraged her to participate. He believed, she told Observer that the At-Home Gala would be a moment of connection, a moment of light in the darkness. “The rush I felt singing “Chacun le sait” that day can’t be explained,” Morley told Observer, “and now, to sing the aria with the Met Orchestra—with my audience in person—is almost too overwhelming to understand.”

That gala also proved to be prophetic for Brownlee, who sang “A te, o cara” from I Puritani: he’ll be Arturo opposite Lisette Oropesa as Elvira in Bellini’s final opera when the Met premieres its first new production of I Puritani since the 1970s on New Year’s Eve.

Sometime after the gala, the tenor reached out to Morley about the possibility of doing a duets CD together. “Erin is a dear friend,” he told Observer, “and I have immense respect for her as an artist. She inspires me as a performer and continually pushes me to want to raise my own level.” Morley offered that “making an album together felt a little bit like planning a wedding. We have to make so many little decisions together!” Both said that the delightful Fille duet between Marie and Tonio was the first selection they chose to include.

Before they came together to record the CD in July 2024, Morley and Brownlee starred as Pamina and Tamino in the Spring 2023 Met premiere of Simon McBurney’s wildly inventive Die Zauberflöte. They were not the original casting: the production was planned with different singers for the canceled 2020-21 season. But their acclaimed high-flying collaboration perhaps signaled that they were a pair the Met needed to feature again. Morley shared that the “Zauberflöte experience was extremely cool. I’ve no doubt we’ll have a blast singing Fille together as well.”

Their individual long associations with the Met began within a season of each other as Brownlee debuted in April 2007 as Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, while Morley, fresh out of Juilliard, joined the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and performed a tiny role in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in February 2007. While the tenor continued in starring roles, Morley moved steadily up the ranks until two 2013 breakthrough appearances, first as Soeur Constance in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites and then, replacing the originally scheduled soprano, as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. These, along with Olympia in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, are among her most significant Met roles.

The upcoming Met Fille will be a role debut for Morley. An orphan raised by an all-male military platoon, Marie inevitably displays a tomboyishness that comes naturally to the soprano: “I love everything about Marie. I connect with her through and through. At one point in my childhood, all my friends were boys, and we played basketball for hours every day. At another point, I wanted to be in the army like my Dad had been… I just had a real desire to be a tough girl.”

On the other hand, Brownlee is a veteran of at least fifteen different productions as Tonio, Marie’s non-military suitor, a role he last performed at the Met in 2011 in Laurent Pelly’s beloved comically antic production, which has also been seen at Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra, La Scala, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. It’s likely that even those who may have never seen the opera will know Tonio’s big first-act aria with its nine high Cs! “I have performed this role many times, and I still feel a rush when I arrive at the high Cs! It’s important to stay settled and focused on producing my best, most efficient singing in this moment. I respect the challenges and embrace the pyrotechnics.”

But Tonio isn’t all about this show-stopping bravura, as “the second act aria is completely different and all about producing a compelling, heart-touching plea in the fight for his love. I often feel a greater sense of satisfaction in being able to execute the second aria than the first!”

While their new duet CD, Golden Age, wasn’t explicitly planned to coincide with the Fille revival, its release was eventually coordinated with the Met opening. Before it was recorded, Brownlee had a notable success with another collaborative CD—Amici e rivali, an all-Rossini program with fellow tenor Michael Spyres. “I was pleased with the success of Amici e rivali, and it highlighted the collegiality and friendship or connection that can spill over to the stage. I thought, ‘why not do it again?’—thus the project Golden Age was born!”

Both artists emphasized that the mid-19th-century Italian and French repertoire included in the new CD with Ivan Repušić conducting the Münchner Rundfunkorchester was chosen to emphasize the most moving and exciting aspects of the operatic voice by highlighting “pieces a little off the beaten path that showcased virtuosic writing that challenged us as singers and communicators.” It seems a sentiment much in line with the Met’s past campaign “The Voice Must be Heard” which the company has brought back this season.

Morley includes lovely versions of “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto and The Bell Song from Delibes’s Lakmé, two of the most often-recorded coloratura chestnuts, while Brownlee explores a virtually unknown extended scena from Donizetti’s Marino Faliero. But the duets are the CD’s real gems, including two Donizetti items, the Fille number and the heavenly “Tornami a dir” from Don Pasquale that many listeners will already know.

“Revelatory” must be the best descriptor for two French duets: “D’ou viens-tu?…C’est le Dieu de la jeunesse,” another slice of Lakmé, and “Ils verront si je mens!” from Bizet’s rarely performed La Jolie Fille de Perth. The latter aptly demonstrates, along with Brownlee’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles aria, that there is so much more to Bizet than Carmen. Both Lakmé excerpts urgently argue for more revivals of a work labeled by many today as untouchable due to the stereotypical treatment of its Hindu characters. Morley, however, argues that the work is far harsher on the British colonists and might profitably be seen as illuminating the destructive effect of the exploitative Raj.

My own favorite track from the CD is “Ah, quel respect…Ce téméraire qui croit nous plaire,” a delicious Rossini gem from Le Comte Ory. This sizzling duel between Adèle and Ory is a French retread swiped from the composer’s Il viaggio a Reims, recently revived by Opera Philadelphia. This track demonstrates that an ideal Met follow-up to Fille would be a revival of Bartlett Sher’s Le Comte Ory production starring Morley and Brownlee!

The Met’s Fille will be conducted by Giacomo Sangripanti, who was so impressive in his Met debut last season, and also feature Susan Graham, Peter Kálmán and actress Sandra Oh as the Duchess of Krakenthorp, a non-singing cameo role that opera companies have cast with Bea Arthur, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. After its run, Morley will add a new Richard Strauss role to her repertoire when she takes on Zdenka in Arabella at the Zurich Opera. She will return to the Met in 2027-28 for a new work, The Mothers of Kherson by Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets with a libretto by American playwright George Brant. Brownlee, who jumped in to replace an ailing colleague for the second performance of the Met’s new La Sonnambula, has remained one of the world’s go-to bel canto tenors for two decades. But he will reveal his first-ever Duke in Verdi’s Rigoletto during February in Tokyo, where last spring he said goodbye to Barbiere’s Almaviva, long a signature role. “Now I’ll yield to the young guys!” Throughout the season, the pair will reunite to present Golden Age concerts, most often with piano, as when Malcolm Martineau accompanies them at New York City’s 92nd Street Y on May 6. When asked which role in the other’s repertoire they wish they could try out, Brownlee said, “Absolutely the Doll in Tales of Hoffmann,” while Morley said she “would steal Tonio from him for a night! Who wouldn’t love to sing “Ah, mes amis”?”

East Coast bel canto autumn began in mid-September when Opera Philadelphia opened its 50th-anniversary season with Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims and continued in early October with a new production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera, where soon Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment returns after more than a decade. Each of these early 19th-century works celebrates that era’s preoccupation with bewitchingly long legato vocal lines as well as jaw-dropping coloratura fireworks. While the two companies tapped directors who chose unconventional approaches to this repertoire, they followed very different paths when casting their singers.

Though it was composed as a pièce d’occasion premiering in Paris to celebrate the 1825 coronation of French king Charles X, Viaggio was the composer’s final Italian opera, a culmination of the brilliant Rossini style that captivated Europe for a dozen years. After just a few performances, the work remained unperformed until the 1980s, after its long-lost score was meticulously reassembled by musicologists. Their exhumation was first performed at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, the composer’s hometown, with famed maestro Claudio Abbado leading a cast featuring many of the era’s leading bel canto stylists.

Revivals across the globe followed, including a 1999 production by New York City Opera, but Viaggio didn’t actively re-enter the repertoire due to the uncommonly static nature of its celebratory libretto and the fiendishly challenging vocal demands required of its large cast.

The opera lacks a conventional plot: a bevy of international travelers on their way to the coronation pass the time while waylaid at the Golden Lily Inn. Some contemporary directors have invented ingenious schemes to animate the work, and Opera Philadelphia chose to import the much-traveled 2015 Dutch National Opera production by celebrated Italian director Damiano Michieletto. Though he didn’t prepare the first U.S. performances of his work, its revival by Eleanora Gravagnola presumably accurately presented his reimagining of Viaggio in a chic 21st-century art gallery as its workers busily prepare for the opening of its latest show.

Michieletto’s fanciful concept often resembled a chaotic waking dream as gallery staff mingled with figures stepping out of paintings. One highlight saw silent actors embodying Goya’s Duchess of Alba, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh and Velázquez’s diminutive Infanta, among others. An impressive coup de théâtre closed the performance as the principals and chorus assembled on stage (à la Sunday in the Park with George) for a stunningly accurate recreation of François Gérard’s painting The Coronation of Charles X.

However, the director often undercut his own facile ingenuity by too frequently filling the stage with distracting, extraneous activity. His hard-working singers were rarely allowed to perform their demanding arias and duets without having to compete for the audience’s attention. One of the more egregious examples was the lengthy duet for Marchesa Melibea and Conte di Libenskof in which mezzo soprano Katherine Beck and tenor Alasdair Kent, rather than just singing to each other, instead labored to mend a lovers’ quarrel between two anonymous actors.

Likely unable to afford assembling an expensive superstar cast like Abbado’s, Opera Philadelphia’s music director, Corrado Rovaris, invited younger singers just beginning their careers. While they embraced their roles with fervor, few displayed the dazzling bravura asked for by Rossini. Though Emilie Kealani’s Corinna proved winning in her early off-stage aria with harp, her delicious duet with Minghao Liu’s confident Belfiore found her strained and shrill for its exciting conclusion. In their duet, Kent’s ill-conceived ornamentation turned clumsy and raw, while the stylish Beck easily overshadowed her struggling partner.

The lushly glowing high notes of Lindsey Reynolds, who found Contessa di Folleville’s coloratura flourishes a strain, might have found Corinna’s music a more congenial fit. Met veteran Scott Conner bravely tackled Lord Sidney’s extended scena, which included a witty salute to the modern premiere’s cast when Conner was stripped to the waist, a frequent feature of Samuel Ramey’s performances. Ben Brady, entirely up to the task, tackled Don Profondo’s tongue-twisting aria with relish.

While the arias and duets were pleasing rather than show-stopping, Rovaris achieved his most gratifying moment with the spectacular Gran Pezzo Concertato ensemble for fourteen singers. Setting a challengingly swift tempo, the conductor propelled his forces to an exhilarating example of Rossini’s trademark slow-building crescendo.

Where Michieletto’s antics proved a fitfully successful solution to Viaggio’s problematic scenario, Rolando Villazón’s excessively dark vision threw a damper over La Sonnambula, which finally arrived at the Met after pandemic postponements. Luckily, it was considerably brightened by the irresistible Bellini pairing of Nadine Sierra and Xabier Anduaga, both in glowing form.

The Met has a long history of presenting starry sopranos and tenors in Sonnambula, beginning in the company’s very first season when Marcella Sembrich and Italo Campanini sang Amina and Elvino. Sembrich was also featured in the work’s second production there, that time with Enrico Caruso. Subsequent revivals paired Lily Pons with Beniamino Gigli, Joan Sutherland with Nicolai Gedda and, in Mary Zimmerman’s much-disliked 2009 production, Natalie Dessay with Juan Diego Flórez.

Premiering six years after Viaggio, Sonnambula folded new-fangled scientific notions about sleepwalking into an otherwise conventional bel canto rom-com about lovers bedeviled by potentially tragic misunderstandings. Where Zimmerman’s vision was rejected for its irreverently contemporary take on Felice Romani’s naïve libretto, Villazón instead applies a heavily psychological approach. Amid black-clad villagers lost on their way to an Alpine production of The Crucible, Villazón’s Amina initially stands out as an infantilized outsider uncomfortable among her conforming peers but eagerly anticipating her engagement to the unsmiling Elvino. She’s often accompanied by her silent, dancing double (played by Niara Hardister), who presumably mirrors Amina’s unconventionally ecstatic spirit but whose overwrought choreography rapidly became wearying.

While the top half of the Met stage features ominous projections of stormy Swiss weather, Johannes Leiacker’s blindingly white unit set taking up the bottom half resembles crudely carved Styrofoam dotted with a half dozen doors. His snowbank serves as the unhelpful all-purpose location for the entirety of the opera’s action. Therefore, having sleepwalked into the visiting Count’s room, Sierra is discovered awkwardly sprawled on what was just minutes earlier the town square. The most risible design appears toward the end when Amina is meant to be sleepwalking in a life-threatening location. Instead, Villazón slides on Sierra and Hardister posing serenely on an absurdly triangular snowdrift, robbing her poignant scene of its danger.

Villazón does stage an unexpected but convincing happy/unhappy ending in which Amina rejects Elvino’s “forgiveness” in order to flee the oppressive environment while grasping a symbolic globe the Count brought to town. However, among his more violent ideas are Alessio harshly thwacking Amina with a wooden ruler and having the townspeople spit on Amina—not once but twice!

Often clad in just a white nightgown, a resplendent Sierra brought a dancer’s grace to Amina’s travails. Vocally, she began uncertainly: in her first scena, the vocal lines were often broken, perhaps interrupted by the busyness her director imposed. Awkward ornamentation detracted rather than added to her cabaletta’s glittering repeat. However, when Amina awakened to accusations of wanton behavior, her richly expressive soprano poured out plangent protests of innocence.

Despite the antic staging imposed on her (Amina must reach upwards toward her dancing double at least a dozen times), Sierra molded her “Ah! Non credea”—perhaps Bellini’s most wrenchingly poignant aria—with exquisite care, following it with a firecracker “Ah non giunge,” which she capped with a joyous and breathtaking high F, greeted with as wildly enthusiastic an ovation as I’ve heard in the house in years.

However, Sierra was at her vibrant best in stirring duets with Xabier Anduaga in a star-making breakthrough night as Elvino.

At his Met debut in 2023, the Spanish tenor brought a warmly liquid voice and an endearingly gauche manner to Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore. But hapless Nemorino is not a “high note role,” while fiery Elvino definitely is, and Anduaga sent many high Cs and Ds into the house with almost impudent ease.

His ardent phrasing revealed a real flair for bel canto, though he could definitely vary his dynamics more: rather too much of Elvino’s admittedly fiery music was delivered in an unvaryingly fortissimo. Just thirty years old, Anduaga should have a long, valuable relationship with the Met—if he chooses his roles carefully.

Sydney Mancasola, in the thankless spitfire role of Lisa, handled what remained of her formulaic music with spirited aplomb. Alexander Vinogradov’s grave bass voice can give pleasure in more dramatic roles, but his Count Rodolfo lacked the easy suavity necessary to put over his gracious “Vi ravviso.” Though Villazón transformed Alessio into the haughty leader of the townspeople, Nicholas Newton, in his Met debut, displayed a promisingly forthright bass-baritone. Bel canto veteran Riccardo Frizza drew delicately supportive playing from his orchestra, though his tempi occasionally were challengingly slow. However, the usually top-notch chorus was disturbingly off-form, frequently out of sync with the rest of the performers.

While Villazón’s production will likely win more friends for Sonnambula than Zimmerman’s did, its ugly heaviness frequently contradicts the passionately lively score. However, Sierra and Anduaga bring such radiant vocal splendor to it that the new Sonnambula instantly becomes the Met’s essential fall offering.

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Except for the Met’s problematic campaign to promote 21st-century opera, the repertoire presented by U.S. companies has lately contracted to the most familiar works, especially those by Mozart, Verdi and Puccini. However, the biannual Boston Early Music Festival continues to mount baroque novelties, while every summer Bard SummerScape lavishes considerable resources on a pair of works rarely if ever seen on this side of the Atlantic.

As a companion to its Martinů and His World festival, Bard last month presented the U.S. stage premiere of Bedřich Smetana’s historical melodrama Dalibor—as always conducted by university president Leon Botstein, who had in June turned his unstoppable curiosity toward Richard Strauss’s first opera Guntram at Carnegie Hall.

Sometimes dubbed “the Father of Czech Music,” Smetana is best known for his delightful comic opera Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) as well as the symphonic poem Má vlast (My Fatherland). He came to opera relatively late; his first, Braniboři v Čechách (The Brandenburgers in Bohemia), premiered when the composer was in his early 40s, with Bride and Dalibor following in quick succession.

While many of his nine remain cornerstones of the Czech Republic’s opera repertoire—I saw a performance of Brandenburgers at Prague’s Národní Divadlo in 1998—they are infrequently revived outside that country. This season, the Vienna State Opera will be mounting a new production of Bride (in German, of course), but it hasn’t been performed at the Met since 1996. Juilliard and the Met did collaborate on Stephen Wadworth’s new Bride conducted by James Levine in 2011, with an eye toward it moving across 65th Street to the Met, but that transfer never materialized.

Before Bard revived it this summer, Dalibor had last been heard nearly 50 years ago at Carnegie Hall with Nicolai Gedda in the title role. That 1977 concert version by the Opera Orchestra of New York led by Eve Queler was followed up almost a decade later by the same organization’s Libuše. I attended that performance of Smetana’s grandly ponderous “festival opera,” which proved singularly memorable for Gabriela Beňačková’s majestically radiant portrayal of the title role.

Like both Brandenburgers and Libuše, Dalibor offers some inspired music in service of oddly uninvolving librettos. Josef Wenzig originally wrote the text in German, which was then translated into Czech by Ervín Špindler, and it features one of the more puzzling heroes of 19th-century opera.

Dalibor, a rebel knight, has been imprisoned for a recent raid on Ploskovice during which he killed its ruling Count. The opening chorus ramps up Dalibor’s curious heroic reputation by acknowledging his guilt while forgiving his murderous act. When Dalibor appears, he ignores the roiling political upheaval caused by his actions and instead muses plaintively on his all-consuming love for his slain male friend Zdeněk, a talented violinist. During an earlier skirmish, Zdeněk was killed by the Count, his decapitated head displayed on a spear’s point. Dalibor’s fury propels a bloody revenge for which he remains proudly unrepentant as King Vladislav condemns him. While imprisoned in the deepest dungeon, Dalibor dreams of Zdeněk who, embodied by actor Patrick Andrews, haunts Jean-Romain Vesperini’s modestly effective staging throughout, both in person and in Etienne Guiol’s looming projections.

During his trial, Dalibor is vehemently denounced by Milada, the Count’s bereaved sister; however—in one of those quintessential “only in opera” reversals—she immediately falls in love with him upon encountering him in court. She then hatches a scheme in which she will disguise herself as a boy in order to enter the prison and facilitate his escape. Once she is taken on as helper, Beneš, the benevolent jailer who is also won over by Dalibor, unearths an old violin for Milada to give to his prisoner so he can while away the lonely hours conjuring Zdeněk. After Milada descends into his cell, she reveals her true identity and declares her love, which is—you guessed it—instantaneously reciprocated during their strangely passionless duet.

Dalibor, who previously longed to join Zdeněk in death, joyously embraces the prospect of life with Milada. He takes up the old violin to celebrate when a string snaps: is that a bad sign, he wonders? Most definitely—Milada is soon mortally wounded leading a failed escape and dies in Dalibor’s arms. This turn of events has Dalibor once again wishing for death, a now even more appealing prospect as he imagines a heavenly three-way with Zdeněk and Milada. In Vesperini’s striking final tableau, Dalibor eagerly offered himself up to Budivoj’s raised sword.

While Libuše builds memorably to its heroine’s spellbinding prophecy, Dalibor ultimately goes nowhere. The central character’s “heroism” is questionable at best, his fate predetermined. Smetana’s opera is sometimes referred to as the “Czech Fidelio,” a misleading comparison as Milada’s prison disguise doesn’t lead to the liberation of Dalibor who, unlike Beethoven’s Florestan, is justly imprisoned. No redeeming last-minute rescue for anyone!

Dalibor did, however, give Botstein and his large forces ample opportunities to shine. James Bagwell’s always eager Bard Festival Chorus reliably excelled in several rabble-rousing scenes. As Jitka, Dalibor’s adopted daughter who joins with Milada in escape planning, Erica Petrocelli turned a minor role into a major one with a boldly clarion soprano that gleamed as it rose. At the beginning of the second act, she joined lyric tenor Terrence Chin-Loy’s ardent Vitek in an exciting conspiratorial duet that made one regret that the pair had so little to do during the remainder of the opera.

Bass-baritone Alfred Walker urgently conveyed King Vladislav’s indecision over agreeing to the people’s cry for Dalibor’s freedom or rightly condemning the guilty man. Vesperini’s frequent placement of Vladislav at the top of Bruno de Lavenère’s striking central chainmail-covered spiral staircase allowed Walker’s easy authority to dominate his scenes. As the jailer Beneš, Wei Wu’s deep bass resounded during his scenes, including an unnecessarily lengthy vignette in which he complains about Milada’s deception.

Botstein had originally cast Polish soprano Izabela Matula and Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr as Milada and Dalibor, but both artists ran into insurmountable visa difficulties. Without much time to recast these unusual and demanding Czech roles, Botstein nonetheless succeeded admirably. Cadie J Bryan, who had initially been hired to cover, took over Milada and threw herself into the opera’s most compelling character with a vivid physicality and vibrantly pulsing high notes. While she sometimes sounded like a lyric pushed to her limits rather than the spinto soprano needed, she passionately embraced Milada’s confusing actions with bold enthusiasm. If her surprising love duet with John Matthew Myers didn’t rise to hoped-for heights, blame Smetana, not its performers.

Myers, who sounded underpowered in Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder with Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra last year at Carnegie Hall, redeemed himself splendidly again with Botstein in the title role of Guntram. Stepping into Smetana’s title role, Myers once again made unusually challenging music sound easy with his tireless, yet sweetly plangent tenor. His rather introverted portrayal elicited more sympathy for the self-absorbed Dalibor than he may have deserved.  

Botstein, his cast and the hard-working ASO made a best-case effort to rehabilitate Dalibor, but I fear that its rather static drama and less than inspiring score will keep it a curiosity unlikely to find much attention outside of the Czech Republic. However, SummerScape will turn its attention on August 17 to Bohuslav Jan Martinů’s exotic Julieta with Petrocelli in the title role. It’s another chance to experience a fascinating work by an underrated composer that Botstein and the ASO memorably performed at Carnegie Hall in March 2019.

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• A King of Countertenors Arrives in New York With a Royal Orchestra

Since his first solo CD was released in 2004, Franco Fagioli has been acclaimed as one of opera’s finest countertenors, a special category for classical “guys who sing high”—to paraphrase the nifty Instagram handle of Australian countertenor David Hansen. In late July, thanks to Andrew Ousley’s always surprising arts organization Death of Classical, the Argentina-born Fagioli finally made his Big Apple debut accompanied by L’Orchestre de L’Opéra Royal, the resident ensemble of the Château de Versailles, at L’Alliance New York.

Fagioli’s concert, drawn from his most recent CD, The Last Castrato: Arias for Velluti, followed the orchestra’s U.S. debut a week earlier with a staging of Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment at the Festival Napa Valley. In charming if rambling remarks before the New York City concert, Tatiana Brandt Copeland, proprietor and president of the tour’s major sponsor Bouchaine Vineyards, recounted the remarkable circumstances that made the Versailles group’s appearances possible. I’m sure Copeland, Ousley and their colleagues were greatly relieved that both the California opera and New York concert transpired without a hitch, especially as several NYC-area festivals have recently had to scramble to cope with major cancellations due to the blocking of visas for European artists.

Prior to their full-length concert at Florence Gould Hall, Fagioli and the orchestra, led by violinist Stefan Plewniak, gave a sneak preview at Death of Classical’s “The Affair of the Poisons,” a multi-media romp at the Printemps department store that recently opened in Manhattan’s Financial District. They performed Arsace’s entrance scena from Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, a number that doesn’t appear on the Velluti CD but neatly fits in with the singer’s unusual preoccupation with rare nineteenth-century bel canto.

Though traditional opera audiences may still find countertenor singing unusual, pop music fans for years have eagerly embraced performers from Frankie Valli to the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson to Prince who exploited their high falsetto ranges.

Though classical countertenors have existed for years, the lasting modern revival began in earnest in the mid-twentieth century with the rise of Alfred Deller in England and Russell Oberlin in the U.S. These men and their successors primarily performed music from the 17th and 18th Centuries, but eventually contemporary composers began to write music for them with increasing frequency. For example, of the twenty-first-century operas performed by the Metropolitan Opera, Nico Muhly’s Marnie, Kevin Puts’s The Hours, Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel include a countertenor role, as does this season’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego by Gabriela Lena Frank.

However, like most countertenors, much of the music regularly performed by Fagioli was originally written for castrati, men who when they were boys were castrated to preserve their high voices. As he has an especially wide range, he sings music written for both soprano and alto castrati. A few became superstars including three who have been particularly associated with Fagioli: Caffarelli (his solo CD of arias premiered by this legendary singer is spectacular!), Carestini and Farinelli. He had a star-making success, in particular, with Carestini’s role of Arbace in Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse whose most famous aria he concluded with an astonishing high D-flat!

When he first performed the alto role of Aci in Nicola Porpora’s Polifemo in 2013, one can hear someone shout “Farinelli” after his hypnotic rendition of the celebrated aria “Alto Giove!”

Though they were nearly unnoticeable during his New York concert, Fagioli has often exhibited several mannerisms—contorted facial expressions and heavily aspirated “machine-gun” coloratura—that remind many of Cecilia Bartoli. Though the pair have rarely appeared together, he did have one of his first big opera successes in a 2005 Zurich Giulio Cesare when he was Cesare to her Cleopatra.

As the eighteenth century wore on, the practice of castration for musical ends lost favor; however, Fagioli has been uniquely interested in the few nineteenth-century operas written with a castrato in mind. As baroque works conditioned audiences to expect heroes with high voices, later composers peopled their operas with trouser roles in which the hero was performed by a female as in Rossini’s Tancredi and Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti ed I Montecchi. However, there still were a few late castrato operas including Aureliano in Palmira by Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato in Egitto, both vehicles of Giovanni Battista Velluti who was castrated for medical rather than musical reasons.

Though the CD is called The Last Castrato, some outlived Velluti who died in 1861. For example, Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato whose voice was recorded, lived until 1922.

Though I have heard some recent broadcasts in which Fagioli didn’t always sound his best, he was in superb form for his long-overdue New York debut that was not, as some have claimed, his first North American appearance. Fifteen years ago, he sang the title role in Cavalli’s Giasone with the Chicago Opera Theater. Though his voice initially sounded small and heavy as he began an aria from Giuseppe Nicolini’s Traiano in Dacia, he quickly found his footing and then captivated his rapt audience with grandly impassioned renditions of extended scenes from Paolo Bonfichi’s Attila and Carlo Magno, another Nicolini work.

Fagioli differs from many other countertenors as he purposely dives with startling immediacy into his chest register. He almost seamlessly negotiates extravagant runs from those penetrating low notes to his dizzying highest. He disdains dramatic arm gestures, preferring to imbue Velluti’s arias with a haunting quiet intensity. While he doesn’t possess the invitingly mellifluous countertenor voice of, say, Max Emanuel Cencic or Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, he draws in the listener with an intently suave bravura that both touches and dazzles us.

Unfortunately, the New York concert let both Fagioli and his audience down by providing only a single-sheet program that simply listed the titles of the arias: no texts, projected titles or even synopses to figure out the virtually unknown vocal works. Most of the excerpts Fagioli performed followed a similar form: a short orchestral introduction leading to an animated recitative, followed by a plaintive cavatina. After it, there might be more agitated recitative leading to an up-tempo cabaletta featuring demanding coloratura and a show-stopping finish. But the particulars of each remained a mystery. Even those like me who previewed via a streaming service the scena from Mercadante’s Andronico got access to just the music: one had to have purchased the Château de Versailles CD to get all the details.

Plewniak and his lively, young thirty-one-member orchestra bubbled with excitement in their vivid overtures by Rossini and Niccolò Zingarelli, whose Giulietta e Romeo the orchestra and conductor have recorded with Fagioli as Romeo. Violinist Plewniak briefly grabbed the spotlight with a spectacularly virtuosic Polonaise from Pierre Rode’s First Violin Concerto.

Fagioli’s encore gave everyone a soupçon of his Printemps appearance: the fiendishly florid Semiramide cabaletta, which he tossed off with almost impudent facility. Let’s hope he returns soon, as he remains one of the most exciting and moving of the many countertenors in opera today.

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Since 1981, the Boston Early Music Festival has been one of the world’s most inventive and immersive summer events. This year’s June edition offered, over the course of eight days—from early morning until nearly midnight—operas, concerts, exhibitions and lectures focusing on music from medieval times through the 18th Century. While most of the events are presented by local and visiting artists, the biennial festival itself mounts as its centerpiece a fully staged revival of a near-forgotten opera, and the 2025 edition, dubbed “Love & Power,” offered Reinhard Keiser’s Die römische Unruhe, oder Die edelmütige Octavia, more conveniently known as Octavia.

Continuing the festival’s commitment to bringing its audience gems from the German Baroque, BEMF also revived its 2021 Telemann double-bill consisting of the late dramatic solo cantata Ino paired with the much earlier three-part comic intermezzo Die Ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch-süchtige Camer Mägden (or Pimpinone). The operatic offerings were once again led by the festival’s co-music directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, who have been in charge since 1997, when the festival presented Luigi Rossi’s L’Orfeo, my first encounter with BEMF. I caught the splendid revival at the Tanglewood Music Festival just after its Boston performances.

One of the most significant and widely appreciated features of BEMF operas, directed since 2007 by Gilbert Blin, is their presentation in an artfully stylized manner that emulates Baroque stagecraft with beautifully painted scenery flats that swiftly slide in and out, coupled with elaborate period costumes that the composer might have recognized. Audience members from around the world enthusiastically embrace this “old-fashioned” approach, as it so markedly differs from the controversially contemporary regietheater production style widely seen in Europe and more and more often in the U.S.

While Baroque operas in Italian and French by Monteverdi, Handel and Rameau, among others, are now seen around the world with increasing frequency, German works remain much rarer, but BEMF has been one of their most influential proponents. Before this year’s Keiser Octavia, the festival mounted Conradi’s Di schöne und getreue Araidne, Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow (an opera never mounted during the composer’s lifetime and one which predates Mussorgsky’s famous version by more than 150 years), as well as Handel’s Almira, the composer’s sole surviving German opera.

BEMF has also recorded Graupner’s near-four-hour Antiochus und Stratonica, which was, I believe, once planned for a festival staging. Continuing this initiative, the next edition of the festival in 2027 will spotlight Emma und Eginhard, its first full-length Telemann opera. Having attended stagings of the composer’s Der geduldige Sokrates in Berlin and Der Sieg der Schönheit just last year in Magdeburg (home of the Telemann-Festtage), I can enthusiastically recommend the chance to experience an important work by this undervalued composer.

On the other hand, Keiser proved a less compelling figure. Many got their first chance to hear his operatic music on an LP released in 1965, which included a half-hour of excerpts from Der hochmütige, gestürzte und wieder erhabene Croesus, a.k.a. Croesus, conducted by Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg, best known for his definitive recording of Weill/Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper.

Croesus, the most frequently produced Keiser opera, which received a rare U.S. staging by the Minnesota Opera nearly twenty years ago, had to wait years before it finally got a complete recording, led by René Jacobs, who has been another of German Baroque opera’s great advocates. My favorite Keiser recording is a disk of his Theatralische Music, featuring the elegant Dutch mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen.

Many of these forgotten works premiered at Hamburg’s Oper am Gänsemarkt, a public, rather than court, opera house that flourished for decades until closing in 1750. Keiser was one of its most important composers, though he was briefly overshadowed by the precocious Handel, who, at age 19, composed his now-lost Nero for the “Goose-Market” company.

In 1705, Keiser presented Octavia there as his rebuttal, composed to a libretto quite similar to Nero’s by Barthold Feind. Like other works of the time, it contains an uneasy mix of serious and comic characters as well as occasional dance sequences. Octavia’s insanely complex plot revolves around the romantic and political chaos caused by Roman Emperor Nero’s all-consuming fascination with Ormœna, the married deposed Queen of Armenia. His infatuation compels him to command that his wife (edelmütige = noble), Octavia, kill herself. As nearly every opera of the time must have a lieto fine (happy ending), Octavia’s suicide attempt is foiled, which prompts Nero to come to his senses, and four “happily” reunited couples join in the festive final chorus. Octavia is enjoying an unexpected renaissance: another production simultaneously arrived at the Händel-Festspiele Halle.

One of the more remarkable features of BEMF’s operas for the festival and for its annual Boston and New York City seasons has been the core group of accomplished singers (mostly American) who appear together year after year. Octavia featured longtime veterans Aaron Sheehan, whose conflicted anarchist Piso saves Octavia, Jason McStoots as Lepidus and Christian Immler as advisor Seneca, whom Nero will sentence to death in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Monteverdi’s sequel (of sorts).

As Nero, Douglas Ray Williams, who debuted with the BEMF chorus in 2003, initially appeared to be out of sorts during Octavia’s final performance, his usually resonant bass-baritone small and constricted. During the second half, he improved but never sounded fully free. On the other hand, rising newcomers mellifluous countertenor Michael Skarke as the Armenian king Tiridates and forthright tenor Richard Pittsinger as General Fabius made much of their scant opportunities; one was eager to hear more from them both.

Octavia’s ladies, played by a quartet of BEMF favorites, dominated the afternoon. Though their roles had only tangential importance to the complex plot, Hannah De Priest and Sherezade Panthaki lent their glowing sopranos and infectious verve to the roles of Livia and Clelia, respectively. Panthaki, in particular, shone more radiantly than in my previous encounters with her.

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As the competing queens, Boston’s reigning Baroque diva Amanda Forsythe as the wily Ormœna waged a valiant campaign against the long-suffering Octavia of Hungarian Emöke Baráth. But nobility won out as Keiser gave his best music to his title character. Much of the opera’s set pieces consist of straightforward arias, but Octavia, as she vacillates between choosing life or death, gets a wrenching extended scena that alternates arias with accompagnati. Baráth’s commandingly shining soprano rose to poignant heights during that scene. While most of his opera’s score is accomplished rather than memorable, Keiser is at his most inspired in Octavia’s music, with which the serenely accomplished Baráth ably demonstrated why she is among today’s most sought-after Early Music sopranos.

Longtime concertmaster Robert Mealy led the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra in a divine reading with especially ravishingly lush strings and plangent, pungent winds: Keiser makes particularly striking use of his four prominent bassoons! The deluxe continuo forces included star pluckers O’Dette and Stubbs with cello David Morris, harpist Maxine Erlander, and harpsichordist Jörg Jacobi.

If Blin’s occasionally overactive production introduced too many characters on stage at any one time, it nearly always succeeded in clarifying the opera’s messy intertwined plot lines. His cast didn’t attempt to replicate historical Baroque gestures but fully embraced the occasionally illogical eccentricities of the “historical” characters.

Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière’s delicately entrancing choreography enlivened the frequent if discursive dance sequences, a great relief after her distracting presence as the incessantly frantic Arlecchino nearly undid the previous evening’s Telemann double-bill.

Pimpinone and Ino made rather odd bedfellows, particularly as they weren’t presented consecutively, but rather the dramatic cantata was split into two halves presented between the three scenes of the comic intermezzo. As Ino, Forsythe portrayed the sister of Semele and widow of Athamas, who, while fleeing the vengeful Juno, drops her baby son into the roiling seas. The soprano was quite wondrous, handling the work’s vocal and dramatic extremes with peerless authority and enviable agility. Happily, she and BEMF have recently recorded Ino for a fantastic new all-Telemann CD from cpo, the festival’s devoted recording label, which also offers several preview arias from Emma und Eginhard.

Pimpinone’s comic battle of wills between an old bachelor and a scheming servant girl may seem familiar to those who know Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, which arrived fifteen years later. The plot twist of Vespetta first feigning modesty then turning wildly demanding after marriage also features in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Though its recitatives and sprightly duets are performed in German, the arias are sung in Italian!

As the gullible dupe Pimpinone, Immler blustered endearingly and sang adroitly with a roundly rich bass-baritone. Occasionally, Danielle Reutter-Harrah’s energetic Vespetta sounded pinched on her very top notes but otherwise invested the conniving spitfire with delicious rhythmic vitality and boisterous fun.

When she and Immler interacted on the stunning Jordan Hall stage in front of the ebullient BEMF Chamber Orchestra, Pimpinone was a delight. However, it often floundered when a masked Lacoursière pranced frantically, mugged outrageously, and contributed little to the slight plot. Thankfully, her presence was minimal in Ino.

Both the Keiser and the Telemann puzzled me as the BEMF forces adopted an archaic practice of often performing the frequent da capo arias in mutilated form. Rather than doing the ABA’ da capo complete, often (but not always) the singer lost their second, ornamented A’ section as the orchestra ended the piece with just the repeat’s intro. The first time it happened during Pimpinone, I didn’t believe my ears and thought I’d lost track of the ABA’ form, but it happened again, then again. At intermission, I quickly scrolled through the IMSLP Pimpinone score on my phone and saw the notation “da capo” over and over. I imagine that many attending the Telemann and Keiser operas didn’t notice, but it struck me as odd that such a respected festival would fall back on a practice I thought had died out decades ago.

German Baroque wasn’t the only vocal focus of my weekend at BEMF, which also included superb works from 17th-century Italy. I was thrilled to visit Emmanuel Church (where the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson first got noticed) to hear the celebrated Belgian ensemble Vox Luminis making a welcome appearance in Vanitas Vanitatum et Omnia Vanita, a program of haunting works by Giacomo Carissimi and Kaspar Förster. Conductor Lionel Meunier, who also sings bass with his group of ten other singers and six musicians, rarely cued his forces, yet they all performed with striking unanimity.

Throughout the four pieces by Carissimi and one by Förster, the words “vanitas” and “omnia” are repeated so often that the program might make a fine drinking game! However, Meunier’s forces performed elegantly with high seriousness, each soloist moving seamlessly to their position adjacent to the church’s altar, then back to join the others. Two of the four sopranos joined in an especially heavenly duet for the opening “Vanitas,” but the expected highlight was a raptly moving rendition of Carissimi’s most celebrated work, Historia di Jepthe. Its composer relates in twenty concise minutes the same story that takes Handel three hours in his great final oratorio. Jephte’s daughter’s plaintive aria of resignation has rarely been as devastating as in the Vox Luminis version, with the sublime final chorus initially delivered by only half the singers, with the remainder joining for a powerfully moving conclusion. As Meunier asked the cheering crowd: what encore could follow such a stunning ending?

Each evening throughout the festival week, shorter, more intimate programs are offered at 10:30 p.m. Following Pimpinone/Ino, most of the performers and audience members cleared out before seven BEMF singer all-stars gathered with nine instrumentalists for Starry, Starry Night, an utterly beguiling hour of hits by Monteverdi and other seventeenth-century Italians. Dame Emma Kirkby was to have been the guest star performing three Dowland songs with O’Dette, but a family emergency prevented her appearance. I doubt anyone missed her as everyone else was on the top of their game, from buds Sheehan and McStoots divinely intertwining in “Zefiro torna” to Baráth and Immler reuniting in their marvelous contribution to BEMF’s essential Steffani CD: Duets of Love and Passion.

Operas-in-concert have long been a popular—and far less expensive—alternative to fully staged presentations. Some audience members will miss opulent sets and costumes, but many appreciate the opportunity to concentrate on the music and not be distracted by “crazy” modern productions. Valued organizations like the Opera Orchestra of New York have ceased operations, while others, like Washington Concert Opera, continue to offer rarely-heard works and exciting rising stars.

Symphony orchestras also occasionally spice up their subscription series with concert operas. Recently, two programmed a pair of distantly related works for distinctly different reasons. Leon Botstein of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) has long been an enthusiastic advocate of the lesser-known works of Richard Strauss, and this year he urgently sought to refute the low reputation of Guntram, the composer’s first opera, at Carnegie Hall.

To conclude its 2024-25 season, the Philadelphia Orchestra stayed on more familiar ground by programming Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an out-of-town try-out for its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who next year will be leading a much-anticipated new Wagner production at the Metropolitan Opera. If Botstein’s valiant effort failed to persuade that Guntram is an unfairly neglected work, Nézet-Séguin’s exciting first Tristan considerably ramped up anticipation for next March’s Met premiere directed by debuting Yuval Sharon.

In 1998, Botstein presented Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena in concert at Avery Fisher Hall with Deborah Voigt and five years later repeated it there, a performance which was later released on CD, as was the ASO’s subsequent Die Liebe der Danae. More recently at Bard Summerscape, Bard led a staging of Die Schweigsame Frau, followed by Daphne at Carnegie Hall. Each revealed that these flawed but rewarding Strauss operas are worthy of attention; however, Guntram’s unconvincing libretto (by the composer) of forbidden love and renunciation in medieval times and its challenging, if workmanlike, score sorely tried one’s patience, even though the score lasts under two hours.

Unheard locally since Opera Orchestra of New York presented it in 1982, Guntram at least gave its audience the chance to hear John Matthew Myers, a splendid budding heldentenor who conquered the fiendish demands of the title role with tireless grace and pleasing fervor. It’s often said that Strauss hated tenors because he gave them such difficult music, but Myers took the hero’s lengthy monologues in stride with sweetly ringing tone and consistently earnest dramatic involvement.

On the other hand, as his unavailable love object, Freihild (the only operatic role Strauss wrote for his wife, Pauline de Ahna), soprano Angela Meade, Myers’s wife and veteran of many previous concert operas, seemed content to unenthusiastically point her lush voice at Strauss’s intermittently thrilling lines. Strenuous passages of despair or ecstasy sounded much the same as she rarely glanced up from her score.

Others in the cast, however, showed much more engagement, particularly Kevin Short in his best recent local outing as the Old Duke and Alexander Birch Elliott, implacably villainous as Freihild’s brutal husband. Sparkly tenor Rodell Rosel supplied much-needed camp energy as the Old Duke’s Fool. The lusty men of the Bard Festival Chorale made one wish their contributions were longer, and the ASO played with polished enthusiasm under Botstein’s sometimes too steady hand.

By the time Strauss composed Guntram, he was 30 and far from a beginner. His hit tone-poems Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung had already premiered, followed soon by Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche and Don Quixote. The opera’s orchestral writing is predictably richly inventive, but though he’d written many of his most beloved songs by then, Guntram’s vocal writing repeatedly aims for thrilling Wagnerian sweep but fails to soar.

Worse, the clunky libretto with its slavish Wagnerian echoes lumbers toward a limp finale. For example, Guntram sings an inappropriate song (Tannhäuser) for a Meistersinger-like assembly after falling inappropriately in love with the leader’s wife (very Tristan-esque). But, alas, there’s no final transfiguration pay-off.

As in most concert operas, Guntram’s singers lined up in front of the orchestra and performed from their scores on music stands; however, the Philadelphia Orchestra Tristan was boldly semi-staged by Dylan Evans on a raised makeshift platform erected behind the orchestra. The singers performed without scores, interacting with modest though apt blocking and no props. There was no goblet for the love potion nor sword to wound Tristan.

Nézet-Séguin’s cast was first-rate from top to bottom. Jonghyun Park’s youthfully plangent tenor opened the afternoon strongly as the Sailor, a role usually performed offstage. But Park was much more prominent singing from a spot in the second balcony of the newly rechristened Marian Anderson Hall. Freddie Ballentine, perhaps best known for his oily, seductive Sportin’ Life in the Met’s Porgy and Bess, proved a surprisingly chilling Melot.

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Scottish mezzo Karen Cargill impressed as an involved and immensely sympathetic Brangäne who, at moments, found the highest notes of her role a strain. Like many Brangänes, Cargill’s warning during the long love-duet didn’t float easily from her perch high in a third-tier box. Brian Mulligan embodied a vigorously incisive Kurwenal who nonetheless was occasionally covered by Nézet-Séguin’s magnificently surging orchestra. Bass Tareq Nazmi gave a nobly anguished account of Marke’s long monologue, which he spiced with flashes of impatient anger.

Whereas his future Met cast will feature newbies Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres in the title roles, Nézet-Séguin chose experienced veterans Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton for his first stab at Tristan. Together, the pair premiered the Met’s previous production in 2016 and subsequently co-starred at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in Simon Stone’s controversial “subway” Tristan.

Despite bumpy moments in the hectic opening section of the Liebesnacht sequence (which was performed with its traditional cut), Skelton sang with admirable freshness and control; both he and Myers in Guntram eschewed the ugly “barking” that one so often encounters from tenors in Wagner and Strauss performances. Though not the most nuanced actor, he rose to the wrenching demands of Tristan’s harrowing third-act hallucinations with hair-raising intensity and penetrating, hall-filling high notes.

For twenty years, Stemme has been the latest Scandinavian Isolde dominating the operatic scene like Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson before her. That line may soon include Norwegian Davidsen, who returns from maternity leave in January for her first Isolde in Barcelona. Having performed her last staged Isolde in Palermo last year, Stemme announced that the Philadelphia Orchestra performances would be the final stop in her Isolde farewell world tour. At 62, she has given no signs that she plans to retire. On the contrary, she’s been adding new, lower character roles that are less demanding on her now receding top register.

She’s taken on with great success the Kostelnicka in Jenufa and plans to add another Janáček opera, The Makropoulos Case. She’s scheduled to move from Brünnhilde to Waltraute in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung as La Scala mounts its new Ring cycle. At her debut last fall as the Nurse in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, however, she appeared uncharacteristically uneasy with her wide-ranging music and failed to dominate her scenes as a good Nurse must.

Though she was electrifying as the furious act-one Isolde, her uneven valedictory appearance gave notice that it was most certainly time for her to move on. Her habit of leaning back to punch out high notes was more pronounced than ever, and nearly everything above the staff was only briefly attacked. Her dynamic range has contracted considerably, so there was little soft singing and most of the afternoon she ranged uneasily from f to fff. A slight but noticeable wobble warped long lines, so much so that her concluding Liebestod, even at Nézet-Séguin’s considerate tempo, was sadly prosaic, though she lightly brushed the final piano “Lust.”

2024-25 has been a particularly fine season for Nézet-Séguin’s German operatic projects. He led flamboyantly satisfying performances of Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome at the Met, and the intoxicating magic of Tristan was most sensitively conjured, neither too fast nor too loud—two accusations that are often fairly aimed at him. His “other” orchestra responded sumptuously with Philadelphia’s strings playing with especially ravishing richness.

The closure of opera houses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic created an alarming decrease in audience attendance that many companies are still struggling with, especially those in the U.S. In response, the Metropolitan Opera’s general director Peter Gelb has embarked on a plan to expand the company’s repertoire by producing new works, but public response to the operas presented has so far been mixed. The most common strategy at the Met and elsewhere to address sagging attendance has been to dramatically increase the number of performances of the traditionally most popular operas, particularly those by Mozart, Verdi and Puccini.

The current Met season has been dominated by familiar titles, including seventeen performances of the company’s new Aida, plus nineteen of La Bohème and seventeen of Rigoletto. Both Tosca and Le Nozze di Figaro were done thirteen times, with Il Barbiere di Siviglia just behind with twelve. Many faithful operagoers have been distressed by this sweeping retreat to classics, but perhaps in response, the Met has shown particular care in presenting them with unusually interesting singers and conductors, as demonstrated by late-season iterations of Aida, Nozze, Barbiere and Bohème, which featured some fine debuts and returns.

Michael Mayer’s arid new Aida made a fraught debut on New Year’s Eve, but made a much happier reappearance in late April and found Angel Blue in increasingly confident form. This time she was surrounded by the familiar clarion Radamès of Brian Jadge and especially gratifying reappearances by Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat as a commanding Amonasro and, most potently, by superstar Elina Garanča as the glamorously aggrieved Amneris. The Latvian mezzo, usually perceived as a coolly accomplished artist, gave such a fiercely committed performance that long and loud cheers greeted her passionate Judgment Scene.

Following a fine first series, a new group of principals took over Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro, including debuting American soprano Jacquelyn Stucker as a plucky Countess, more actively involved in the comic intrigues than her predecessor, the patrician Federica Lombardi. Though nerves may have caused a rocky “Porgi amor,” Stucker revealed an interestingly smoky soprano that rose easily to bright high notes in a poignant “Dove sono.” Unfortunately, she was paired with the monstrously boorish Count of Adam Plachetka, whose increasingly gritty bass-baritone makes his continued presence in the Met’s Mozart productions difficult to understand.

The newlywed servants featured a far happier pairing, with the familiar Figaro of Luca Pisaroni delighting in his new Susanna—fellow Italian Rosa Feola, whose warmly mercurial portrayal betrayed no trace of soubrette brittleness. Her teasingly seductive “Deh vieni non tardar” proved the evening’s highlight and was greeted by the audience’s biggest ovation. Conductor Joana Mallwitz again led her second cast with verve, and they responded to the comic Richard Eyre staging with engaging enthusiasm, none more than Emily D’Angelo’s horny Cherubino, sung with roguish charm.

A similarly accomplished second cast convened for Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia, Nozze’s “prequel,” on May 16 in Bartlett Sher’s effervescent first and best Met production. It brought two company debuts: American tenor Jack Swanson as Count Almaviva and Hungarian bass-baritone Peter Kálmán as Don Bartolo. The latter brought considerably more voice and far less clichéd buffo shtick than usual to the role of Rosina’s intemperate guardian. Though stylish new conductor Giacomo Sagripanti set a breathless tempo for “A un dottor della mia sorte,” Kálmán handled the patter with wonderfully exasperated aplomb.

Tall and handsome, Swanson made a more equivocal impression. While his Count began by uneasily serenading Rosina, he relaxed and was genuinely amusing in his duo disguises as the drunken soldier and as Don Alonso, the faux music teacher. But Swanson seized on the current trend to include the Count’s extended, extraneous scena near the opera’s end—but its elaborate coloratura showed the tenor hasn’t yet unlocked the secret to making it sound smoothly effortless.

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Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky hadn’t returned to the Met since his 2019 debut as Schaunard in La Bohème, but he came back with a restlessly livewire Figaro, one who vigorously sought to dominate his namesake opera. His bold “Largo al factotum” signaled that his sturdy baritone belonged at the Met, and if his coloratura wasn’t particularly suave, it still moved more easily than Swanson’s. Russian baritone Alexander Vinogradov (a holdover from the premiere cast), usually seen at the Met as dour types like Ramfis in Aida or Wurm in Luisa Miller, displayed deft comic flair as Don Basilio, and his cleverly underplayed “La calunnia” really clicked.

Berta’s aria di sorbetto often passes quietly, but soprano Kathleen O’Mara’s brightly agile, neatly ornamented rendition signaled that the young prize-winner is a welcome Met addition. But most of all, this Barbiere reiterated that Aigul Akhmetshina is one of today’s brightest new stars. Her bewitching Carmen last season was the lustrous center of Carrie Cracknell’s misbegotten new Carmen, while this time her slyly anarchic Rosina dazzled with witty energy and a voluptuous mezzo that soared from booming contralto lows to the stunning high D that capped her urgent “Contro un cor.” Her easy chemistry with both Swanson and Zhilikhovsky and her mischievous mocking of Kálmán bound together this especially delightful Rossini romp.

The season’s fourth Bohème cast came together in a May 25 matinee of striking unanimity. Though they likely had little rehearsal together, they exuded an easy camaraderie that suggested they had united as Puccini’s young crew many times. Only occasional waywardness between the stage and Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s enthusiastic baton betrayed that it was their maiden voyage together. When scheduled conductor Riccardo Frizza withdrew, Nézet-Séguin stepped in for the first of the cast’s four performances, with Sagripanti taking over for the remaining three.

Much of the interest in this late-season Bohème centered on its Mimi, American soprano Corinne Winters, who had been away from the Met since her 2011 debut in the tiny role of Countess Ceprano in Rigoletto, a role that also served as the Met debut for Dawn Upshaw and Sondra Radvanovsky. Winters has recently become a major star in Europe, thanks particularly to her acclaimed portrayals of Janáček heroines.

As the modest seamstress, Winters brought an expressive if slender soprano with a vibrant top and created an achingly poignant portrayal. In her haunting “Mi chiamano Mimi,” Winters imbued Mimi’s ecstatic outburst to spring—“Ma quando vien lo sgelo”—with a fragile optimism tempered by an undeniable awareness of her frail mortality. She made palpable Mimi’s intense eagerness for love so that the duet “O soave fanciulla” and the Café Momus scene conveyed a desperate happiness she knew wouldn’t last.

Her encounters with Marcello, then Rodolfo, in the third act showed a woman painfully cognizant of her illness. While Anthony Clark Evans was a warm and friendly Marcello to the struggling Mimi, Dmytro Popov, who has sung Rodolfo at the Met since 2016, appeared more concerned with lunging big high notes to the Family Circle. His completely prosaic approach to some of opera’s most soulfully romantic music did a disservice to both Winters and Puccini.

Debuting Hungarian-Romanian bass Alexander Köpezi offered a winning Colline, but the biggest impression among the four Bohemian roommates came from Sean Michael Plumb’s ebullient Schaunard, whose lustrously smooth baritone shone in every appearance. The venerable 1981 Franco Zeffirelli production requires that its Musetta make an outrageously over-the-top spectacle of herself during the second act, but Gabriella Reyes’s take was even more vulgar than most. Her excesses continued into the third act, so much so that Musetta’s generosity to the dying Mimi in the final scene rang hollow. Her big, bright soprano was also undermined by an insistent vibrato that marred her singing throughout.

As these popular revivals demonstrated, the Met has been trying diligently to populate its long-running classics with fresh, vital casts that should invite even the most seasoned audience members to revisit operas they’ve seen many times. I was, for the most part, surprised and delighted by these second, third or even fourth casts, which in most cases surpassed the season premieres that usually get the most attention.

Next season, the Met will present twenty-one performances of La Traviata—the only Verdi opera programmed—as well as twenty, seventeen and fifteen of the Puccini trifecta of La Bohème, Turandot and Madama Butterfly. While the premieres of each offer tantalizing stars, again take special note of their later casts, which will include, for example, Feola, Enkhbat and debuting Liparit Avetisyan in Traviata; Sonya Yoncheva and Elena Stikhina as Cio-Cio-San, the former paired with the deluxe Sharpless of Quinn Kelsey; and returning soprano Anna Pirozzi as Turandot.

In addition to continuing many performances of these standard repertory works, the Met is also revealing a new scheduling approach. This season, one Bohème cast followed another by weeks—or even months. But in 2025-26, two casts will often perform in the same week. On March 14, 2026, for example, the Yoncheva Butterfly cast will appear at the matinee, followed by Stikhina committing harakiri in the evening.

When details of star soprano Anna Netrebko’s lawsuit against the Metropolitan Opera surfaced, one of the projects planned for her was a revival of Tchaikovsky’s searing tragedy Queen of Spades. After she became soprano non grata at the Met in response to the Ukraine war and her support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, several Netrebko plans were dropped, while others, like new productions of Lohengrin and La Forza del Destino, proceeded with other sopranos.

But the company decided to proceed with Queen of Spades starring Sonya Yoncheva, another marquee name, as Lisa, while Netrebko’s first stab at the opera has been rescheduled for late June at the Vienna Staatsoper alongside her now ex-husband Yusif Eyvasov. After his Met success as Hermann in 2019, Eyvasov would surely have repeated it in 2025, so the Met had to also find a new Hermann: a task that proved to be inordinately complicated.

The opera’s plot, based on a novella by Pushkin, revolves around soldier Hermann’s reckless quest to uncover the magical three cards that will guarantee his gambling success. The Met’s plans to put its Queen of Spades back on stage ultimately involved three tenors. When this spring’s revival was announced in February 2024, American Brian Jagde was Hermann, a new role for him. When I asked him about it last year, he offered that “Hermann is a role I feel I can really sink my teeth into and… it presents challenges I feel I’m now ready for in my development as an artist.”

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However, less than a month before the premiere, Jagde withdrew, later revealing that he hadn’t had sufficient time to prepare for the role. The opera company then summoned Brandon Jovanovich, who had starred in a new production of Queen of Spades just last season at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera, to take over. Then, the day before the dress rehearsal, the Met announced that Jovanovich would be replaced by Armenian tenor Arsen Soghomonyan.

A veteran Hermann, Soghomonyan amply demonstrated in his hastily arranged Met debut that he has the powerful tenor needed. But perhaps nerves or a lack of rehearsal caused him to crack at several crucial points. No doubt embarrassed by those mishaps, the tenor appeared for his solo bow, brandishing the pistol he used to “kill himself” minutes earlier. Acknowledging the enthusiastic applause, he pointed it to his temple with a shrug of apology.

In another turn of the opera world merry-go-round, Soghomonyan had to leave Turandot at the Greek National Opera to take on his surprise Met duties. He was replaced in Athens as Calaf by Jagde whose website still lists Hermann on his schedule at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper for late June.

A blunt actor, Soghomonyan embodied Hermann’s distracted obsession effectively and otherwise delivered his increasingly desperate music with burning intensity. Aside from the unfortunate cracks, he fervently hurled potent high notes into the packed house.

He and Yoncheva manifested a chilly chemistry, emphasizing that Hermann is involved with Lisa primarily to gain access to the Countess, her grandmother, to learn the old woman’s secret of the three cards. Absent from the Met since her very problematic turn in 2023 as Bellini’s Norma, the Bulgarian soprano gave us a fiercely emotional Lisa—one as possessed by her self-destructive passions as Hermann was by his gambling addiction. Her instrument has grown significantly, and she flooded the Met with rich tone in her pair of tortured arias. Her top notes can shade sharp and worn, but they were in firmer shape than they had been in Norma. Clearly, Tchaikovsky brings out the best in Yoncheva, as she had shown in Iolanta at the Met in 2019. She sounded considerably better at the premiere than she does in the dress rehearsal video the Met posted.

One of the highlights of Elijah Moshinsky’s vivid production when it premiered in 1995 was Leonie Rysanek’s gripping portrayal of the old Countess, her final role with a company that adored her. Her renowned flamboyance embraced Moshinsky’s most breathtaking moment: after Hermann has invaded the Countess’s bedroom and scared her to death, her ghost appears to reveal to him the secret of the cards: Three! Seven! Ace! Moshinsky has the Countess, now clad in infernal red, noisily break through the floor of the soldier’s quarters. Rysanek was genuinely frightening, but this season’s Violeta Urmana failed to make much of her striking entrance. In her earlier appearances, Urmana looked smashing in Mark Thompson’s sumptuous gowns but appeared too proudly erect for the frail noblewoman so easily frightened to death by the home invader. However, Urmana brought a haunting vulnerability to her nostalgic Grétry aria that she and conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson took very slowly.

The 1995 premiere also featured the Met debut of Dmitri Hvorostovsky in his signature role of Prince Yeletsky. The character has little to do beyond sing a ravishing aria proclaiming his love for Lisa. Igor Golovatenko, who made his Met debut as Yeletsky in 2019, repeated the role with less success this time. Though he was in better voice than he had been in the fall as a muted di Luna in Il Trovatore, his aria this time was performed without much tenderness or legato. One wished that he had traded places with Alexey Markov, the Met’s Tomsky of choice since 2011, who was in securely ringing voice this season and would have made a more fluent Yeletsky.

Maria Baranova found Pauline’s plaintive aria much more congenial than she had the rabble-rousing of Preziosilla in La Forza del Destino last season. She doubled as a dashing Daphnis in the enchanting second-act Mozartian pastorale in which she vied with Markov’s hearty Plutus for the affections of Ann-Kathrin Niemczk’s lovely Chloë. Chad Shelton stood out as Tchekalinsky, sounding as if he might have easily taken over as the Met’s fourth Hermann!

Conductor Wilson made an impressive debut in 2022, leading Shostakovich’s scorchingly satiric Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. She ably negotiated the score’s extremes of Tchaikovsky’s score from Hermann’s fiery outbursts to the beguiling enchantments of the pastorale. Very late in a long season, the company’s orchestra and chorus remained for Wilson on top of their game. If her Queen of Spades hadn’t completely jelled at its fraught premiere, it will surely improve by the fifth performance, which will be the Met’s final Saturday matinee broadcast on 7 June.

In September of 1966, the Metropolitan Opera opened its brand-new Lincoln Center home with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra while New York City Opera, now its close neighbor across the plaza, simultaneously served up sly counter-programming with Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. As it turned out, despite acclaim for Leontyne Price’s Cleopatra, the Barber work flopped while the Handel was a surprise hit and her Egyptian queen made Beverly Sills an overnight sensation.

Nearly sixty years later—likely through sheer serendipity—Giulio Cesare is once again competing with Antony and Cleopatra, the latter this time a new work by Adams that premieres at the Met today (May 12). Earlier this spring, however, Handel’s work turned up in two guises: a fully staged production by R.B. Schlather at Hudson Hall and a concert version by conductor Harry Bicket and The English Concert for their annual visit to Carnegie Hall. If neither proved entirely satisfying, both proved brave attempts to do justice to one of baroque opera’s most complex and challenging masterpieces.

Opera seria, the genre in which Handel worked, is rigidly constructed of solo da capo arias connected by recitatives with an occasional duet or trio tossed in. Giulio Cesare is by far the longest of the composer’s works, and its original 1724 version contains more than thirty solos, nearly all da capo arias in A-B-A’ form. The acclaimed René Jacobs recording from the early 1990s contains more than four hours of music, which means that most contemporary performances of Giulio Cesare will be abridged. The dilemma then becomes whether to omit an aria entirely or to include a partial version: neither of this spring’s editions solved it satisfactorily.

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Since it began its Carnegie series of Handel operas and oratorios, The English Concert has presented its offerings complete or only slightly cut. It was then a shock when, due to time restrictions imposed by the venue, Cesare lost nine numbers. Those omissions seriously unbalanced the carefully wrought libretto of Nicola Haym, which intertwines the love story of Caesar and Cleopatra with the trials and tribulations of Pompey’s widow Cornelia and son Sesto. The latter lost two of his five arias while Achilla, one of Cornelia’s aggressive suitors, was permitted just one of his three.

The excisions in the Hudson Hall staging (which lasted just three hours, including a single intermission) were even more drastic: not only were complete arias omitted, but a good number of the remaining ones were reduced by two-thirds to just their initial A section. Given Schlather’s infectious enthusiasm for Handel opera—Cesare is the second in a series presented in Hudson, a scenic town two hours north of New York City, after he previously directed Alcina and Orlando in Manhattan—it’s puzzling that he abridges the works he mounts so severely.

But his strength as a director was in eliciting thrilling, risk-taking performances from his collaborators. He ignored Hudson Hall’s proscenium and placed in front of it his simple set of two towering black walls angled together. There in Terese Waddon’s contemporary costumes and Masha Tsimring’s haunting chiaroscuro lighting, the singers threw themselves into Handel and Haym’s characters with both dramatic intensity and musical flair. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the show was Ruckus, a lively, small, conductor-less, period-instrument ensemble which liberally rejiggered the accompaniment, adding percussion and other sounds that Handel would not have recognized. But, to my ears, their pizzazz and enviably close collaboration with the singers added rather than detracted from the experience.

Randall Scotting’s commandingly forthright countertenor Cesare began a bit uncertainly with heavily aspirated coloratura. Soon, though, his colorful singing settled down—particularly as his ardor for Cleopatra grew. The queen’s protean fascination is amply conveyed by vivaciously dazzling Song Hee Lee, who had late last year demonstrated her Handelian credentials with William Christie at Juilliard.

Tolomeo, her brother, is often played as an epicene fop, and though at first it seemed Chuanyuan Liu was headed in that direction, he gradually evolved into a genuinely frightening monster in a red suit. His predation toward Cornelia was less convincing than that of Douglas Ray Williams’s slimy Achilla, but their evil advances brought out the noble fire in Meridian Prall’s urgent, richly sung Cornelia. But the revelation of the afternoon was young soprano Raha Mirzadegan as the traumatized, then vengeful Sesto. Though she put across her angry arias well, her achingly beautiful “Cara Speme” was the opera’s highlight.

The English Concert’s somewhat staid, brightly lit Cesare couldn’t help but be tamer, though it was still the most dramatically vital performance yet from the group. In the past, nearly all the performers sang from scores behind music stands; however, everyone in Cesare performed from memory and interacted in front of the orchestra. No stage director was indicated, which might explain why far too many entrances and exits lessened the tension. However, the singers gamely pushed this Cesare beyond the ordinarily bland concert opera concept.

Though he sang with almost insouciant ease, French countertenor Christophe Dumaux was almost too easy-going as he traversed Cesare’s dire vicissitudes. However, his casual delight (and ours) in duetting first with hornist Ursula Paludan Monberg in “Va tacito” and then violinist Nadja Zweiner in “Se in fiorito” distracted from the opera’s forward motion. His suavely beleaguered emperor contrasted markedly with the hyperactive Cleopatra of Louise Alder, who made sure every one of her character’s myriad moods was clearly indicated. Her cool and clear, if charmless, singing was always neatly accomplished, but she failed overall to bring her complex character to life.

Paula Murrihy dispatched Sesto’s arias with aplomb but remained a bit anonymous, particularly next to her grieving mother, played with riveting élan by rising Scottish contralto Beth Taylor, who alone got to keep all of her music, including her oft-cut happy aria near the end. The sumptuous Taylor and eager Murrihy collaborated movingly in the ravishingly painful duet of parting that ends the first act. Bicket took it very slowly and encouraged his singers to dig into the exquisite dissonances that crown the piece.

Though he had little to do, as Curio Thomas Chenhall stood out for his lushly round baritone while Morgan Pearse did what he could with the little that was left of Achilla’s music. American countertenor John Holiday, finally released from his tiny roles in new operas at the Met—Eurydice and The Hours, bit voraciously into Tolomeo’s fiery arias but didn’t convince that its brutal histrionics really showed him at his best. Perhaps he might have been better cast as Sesto.

Bicket’s musicians played with their expected precision and lush polish, but his always sensible tempi lacked the passionate drive that the younger and meaner Ruckus brought to the music drama.

The back of each Ruckus musician’s t-shirt boldly proclaimed that Hudson Hall offers the “Best News in a While for the NY Opera Scene”! If Schlather’s Giulio Cesare didn’t entirely live up to that extravagant claim, it did make one eager to attend what’s up next: Deidamia, Handel’s rarely-performed final opera. In March of 2026, The English Concert returns for Handel’s very secular oratorio Hercules with Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg as the fatally jealous Dejanira, one of her very best roles. 

In early December, after the final two performances of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Metropolitan Opera, something out of the ordinary happened. Amid the thunderous cheers when South African-born soprano Elza van den Heever—who had just sung the title role—appeared for her solo bow, a shower of confetti made from torn-up programs rained down on the stage from high up in the opera house. This rarely offered (if officially frowned-upon) tribute marked a seismic advance in the local appreciation of a versatile performer who had been sensational as the Kaiserin in the splashy Frau revival. Van den Heever had ascended to true Met stardom! As the vigorous applause continued, the soprano admitted she was at first confused, then “gobsmacked” by the surprising confetti tribute. “Receiving love and appreciation from an audience is truly one of the best feelings in the world,” she told Observer.

On April 29, the soprano’s triple-Strauss Met season continues with the title role in an eagerly-awaited new production of Salome, the composer’s riveting early one-act shocker drawn from Oscar Wilde’s purple adaptation of the lurid Biblical story of a capricious young girl who demanded the beheading of John the Baptist as payment for her provocative dance for King Herod. Long delayed by pandemic closures and the resulting scheduling chaos, the production will mark the Met debut of noted German director Claus Guth, whose work has only previously been seen in New York when he and tenor Jonas Kaufmann collaborated on Doppelganger at the Park Avenue Armory several years ago. 

Over the course of several refreshingly frank conversations, van den Heever shared reflections on her career and why the music of Strauss has proven so special to her. “I love how his music, in learning it, makes me a smarter individual, and I feel like I am embraced in a hug that lasts for all of the hours the piece is long,” she said. “Strauss makes me feel loved and like I am part of a world that is supernatural and extremely special.”

Since her Met debut in 2012 as Elizabeth I in the opera house’s premiere of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (for which she shaved her head to emulate the Virgin Queen’s signature look), the soprano has shone there in operas from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Berg. “I have been very lucky in my early life to have had mentors who insisted that I keep the versatility in my instrument alive and well.” Wholly trained in the U.S., van den Heever arrived at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at age eighteen as a mezzo soprano pursuing first her bachelor’s, then a master’s. While she was in the Merola Opera Program at the San Francisco Opera, Dolora Zajick took the young singer aside to tell her she wasn’t a mezzo after all but a soprano—one her future manager, Matthew Epstein, would dub “the real deal.”

To the astonished, newly annointed soprano, Epstein laid out his vision for her: a steady, patient path in which she would “make haste slowly.” When she was just 25, he predicted that she had the potential to conquer the lyric dramatic roles in which she’s now enjoying wild acclaim at many of the world’s major opera houses. During her formative years at the Frankfurt opera, she solidified her technique by first taking on Mozart and bel canto operas like Norma and Anna Bolena. She also dipped into Puccini as Giorgetta in Il Tabarro for a staging by Guth that was her introduction to regietheater, a non-traditional approach to opera that proved a revelation to the rising singer. She realized that she didn’t want to perform in “boring” productions but ones that stimulated both performers and audiences.

Epstein believes that the challenges stemming from her dyslexia, combined with her quiet determination, have created an artist supremely prepared to conquer demanding German roles like the Kaiserin and Salome (the latter persona is on stage for nearly all of the opera’s 110 minutes). “It’s all about patience and hard, long hours in the practice room,” van den Heever said. “Like any athlete, we as singers have to train our muscles to be able to build up the stamina it requires to sing those long, difficult monologues. Pacing is also about fueling your body properly and staying hydrated!”

Normally, van den Heever prepares her roles with coaches who are experts on the opera she’s learning. They were particularly helpful last year, as Frau was “the most difficult singing I have ever done.” But the lockdown of 2020 meant that she had to work on Salome by herself in the small French village she calls home. When she wasn’t immersed in Strauss, she became one of the pandemic’s most surprising social media breakout stars when she began to regularly post photos of her extraordinary cakes. Since resuming performing, the singer still carves out time to exercise her baking muscles for delicious, if dangerous-looking, Salome-themed creations. For her role debut in Paris, she proffered the prophet’s severed head to her thousands of Instagram followers. More recently in New York, she baked up a remarkably detailed pomegranate like the one to which Salome lasciviously compares the red mouth of Jochanaan—a fruit prominently featured in promotional posters and clips the Met has created anticipating van den Heever’s Salome.

She is reticent to divulge too many spoilers about the upcoming Met production, which will reunite van den Heever with—as the doomed Jochanaan—Swedish baritone Peter Mattei, her partner in William Kentridge’s 2019 Met Wozzeck. She would say that she believes Guth is creating a very sympathetic portrait of Salome, and that when opera companies hire her for the role, they’re getting a “six-foot, lumpy” soprano unsuited for a striptease to the celebrated Dance of the Seven Veils. Guth’s vision of that crucial episode features six “mini-Salomes” from age eight and up, who share the dance with van den Heever and a double for Herod, her leering stepfather.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, praised “her voice as truly one of a kind—vibrant, crystal clear, and yet powerfully expressive. Elza is the consummate artist, and her star quality is undeniable.” In 2018 Nézet-Séguin was on the podium for Elektra, both his and van den Heever’s first Strauss opera in New York. As Chrysothemis, she stole the show by bringing to startlingly vivid life the heart-wrenching fears of the protagonist’s younger sister with soaring, gleaming high notes that are the essential attributes of a true Strauss soprano. He then led both her first Kaiserin in concert in Europe just before the pandemic, as well as last fall’s Met Frau run, and he will again be in charge of the new Salome. 

At Carnegie Hall in June, he and van den Heever will conclude their Strauss season with a Met Orchestra concert featuring five favorite orchestral songs including “Zueignung” and “Cäcilie” because Nézet-Séguin believes “Elza is the ideal artist to bring [Strauss’ works] to life.” Before she appears that evening, the orchestra will play a suite from Der Rosenkavalier, so I asked her if she has her eye on the Marschallin, that opera’s heroine. She demurred, shaking her head as she replied, “Not yet!” But she does have her eye on the title role of Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, an opera in which she appeared earlier in her career as the boyish Composer.

But for now, she is “finally at a place in my career where I can start to repeat roles!” Salome at the Met follows a controversial 2022 Paris production by American director Lydia Steier that featured the diva vigorously straddling Herod during the Dance of the Seven Veils. What van den Heever and Guth have in store for that eagerly anticipated sequence and the rest of Salome will be revealed on April 29, with seven more performances continuing through May 24. The Saturday matinee on May 17 will be transmitted in HD to theaters worldwide, which the soprano is grateful for—her parents in South Africa, along with thousands of other people, will be watching.

When I shared that it was disappointing that she won’t be appearing with the Met next season, she winked and whispered, “I’ll be back!”

Opera at the Met may mean expensively lavish stagings with the world’s biggest stars, but that’s not all you’ll find at Lincoln Center. Running there now concurrently are revivals of two Mozart masterpieces that amply demonstrate that the Met can also deliver wonderfully entertaining ensemble operas. That shouldn’t suggest that their casts don’t include superior artists delivering exceptional performances, but you won’t find marquee names that guarantee sold-out houses.

We’ve come a long way from the days when it was nearly impossible to snag a ticket to hear Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti. That situation has become all too apparent at the Met since its continuing banishment of tainted superstar Anna Netrebko. But unlike many works by Puccini, Verdi or Wagner, Mozart’s operas demand charismatic singing actors working closely together with a minimum of diva/divo posturing. In late March, the first nights of this season’s Die Zauberflöte and Le Nozze di Figaro revivals were packed with enthusiastic, markedly younger audiences having the best of times.

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Two years ago, the company achieved a remarkable May Mozart Miracle when it premiered stimulating new productions of Don Giovanni by Ivo van Hove and Die Zauberflöte by Simon McBurney, both magnificently conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. If this season’s revivals didn’t achieve those exalted musical levels, they delivered securely confident renditions of complexly demanding works, a pair of operas that couldn’t be more different from each other.

Zauberflöte, a German-language singspiel and Mozart’s next-to-last opera, tenaciously juxtaposes sublime episodes of noble lovers overcoming serious obstacles with ribald comedy involving a lovelorn bird-catcher. Nozze, drawn from Beaumarchais’s revolutionary play and sung in Italian, brings us a near-perfect comedy of manners. McBurney’s celebrated production of the former embraces all of the work’s many contradictions head-on in a wild contemporary ride that features sound effects from a real-time Foley Artist and live projected drawings that fill the back of the mostly bare stage. Reset in the 1930s, Richard Eyre’s Nozze from 2014 mostly ignores the work’s pathos and rumblings of class warfare in favor of a Downton Abbey-flavored farcical approach.

Having been ecstatically transported by McBurney’s antic vision at its premiere two years ago, I was worried that it would be less satisfying on second viewing. I needn’t have been concerned as it once again proved deliriously satisfying. Conductor Evan Rogister’s fleet vision of the score sometimes moved too fast for comfort, so there were instances when he and his cast parted ways. But overall, the orchestra, which is raised up from the pit and fully visible throughout, played with a lively sheen. Prince Tamino’s magic flute and Papageno’s glockenspiel are prominently featured, and Chelsea Knox and Katelan Tràn Terrell respectively relished their moments in the spotlight.

Several in the cast reprised their roles from two years ago. Alexandra Shiner, Olivia Vote and Tamara Mumford once again shone as the mellifluous and horny Ladies, as their mistress Kathryn Lewek demonstrated why—for more than a decade—she’s been the world’s go-to Queen of the Night. She imbued her first aria with gut-wrenching pathos, her second with astonishing ferocity. Yet after nearly eighty outings there as the Queen, shouldn’t the Met offer Lewek other roles?

Stephen Milling towered over everyone as a severe Sarastro. Though he exuded calm authority, he found the role’s extreme low notes difficult. Thomas Olliemans continues to reign supreme as McBurney’s ragtag Papageno of choice: his pleasing, if ordinary, baritone married to affably impeccable timing again made him the opera’s irresistible Everyman.

Ben Bliss and Golda Schultz, this season’s new hero and heroine, brought vibrant conviction and suave Mozartean style to Tamino and Pamina. Bliss’s bright tenor has grown adding a welcome heroic dimension to the prince, particularly in his stirring interview with Shenyang’s rough-hewn Speaker. Schultz’s always glowing soprano broke our hearts with her grief-stricken “Ach, ich fühls” and then greeted her beloved with a radiant “Tamino mein!”

Eight days later, Joana Mallwitz made her Met debut conducting a bustling Nozze for which she elicited a richly transparent reading from her eagerly buoyant orchestra, now back in the pit. She accompanied her singers with alert concentration, which was not an easy task as they negotiated Eyre’s screwball comedy with split-second timing. Mallwitz brought her first Met Mozart to a triumphant close by following Federica Lombardi’s heavenly spun lines of forgiveness with a riotous but controlled final ensemble.

Lombardi, as the coolly elegant Countess, demonstrated that the rigors of her very recent first stab at Bellini’s Norma in Vienna hadn’t caused any ill effects beyond a slight harshness on her highest forte notes. That the statuesque Countess was an inch or two taller than her philandering husband only added to the well-deserved comeuppance meted out to Joshua Hopkins’s strutting Count. His lean, ringing baritone, so thrilling in his boastful aria, contrasted perfectly with Michael Sumuel’s hearty, earthier bass-baritone as Figaro.

Sumuel opted for a less rebellious approach to the wily servant than some have, but his wide-open smile and earnest command of every situation made him a thoroughly winning Figaro. Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska finally got her chance to move beyond Puccini at the Met, demonstrating a deft Mozart flair as a lovely, lively Susanna. Her sweetly blooming voice blended divinely with Lombardi’s richer soprano in a ravishing Letter Duet.

French mezzo Marianne Crebassa was due to return to the Met in her debut role of Cherubino but withdrew earlier this year. The Met then awarded the plum part of the randy adolescent to young Sun-Ly Pierce, who glowed impetuously in her graceful arias and bonded with palpable chemistry to the charmingly forthright Barbarina of Mei Gui Zhang.

Brenton Ryan’s handsomely bold Basilio was a refreshing take on the role, However, Elizabeth Bishop’s worn mezzo gave limited pleasure as Marcellina, Figaro’s newly reunited mother, while Maurizio Muraro who has portrayed Bartolo (Mozart’s and Rossini’s) more than a hundred times at Lincoln Center huffed and puffed through his tart aria.

Both Die Zauberflöte and Le Nozze di Figaro continue at the Met through April 26. That afternoon, the latter will be beamed around the world in HD. Inopportune scheduling means that Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Nozze’s “prequel,” will arrive in theaters a month later, on May 31. Also in May, five new principals will join Mallwitz for more Nozze performances. Of particular interest will be rising American soprano Jacquelyn Stucker in her Met debut as the Countess; Rosa Feola, a rare native Italian Suanna: and tall, slim mezzo Emily D’Angelo in her first Met Cherubino, a role she was surely born to play.

After its annual winter hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera reopened with a pair of productions that chronicle their protagonists’ dangerous, intensely personal quests. The journey in Moby-Dick, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s epic novel in its Met premiere, ends in death and destruction, while the latest revival of Beethoven’s Fidelio concludes with the victory of good over evil. If neither production could be deemed a triumph, both proved to be bright spots in what has been, so far, a pretty lackluster Met season.

Condensing Melville’s vast and discursive work into a three-hour opera may have seemed as foolish as Captain Ahab’s increasingly desperate voyage to find the whale that maimed him, but Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick has been met with success since its 2010 premiere at the Dallas Opera, though it has not proved as popular as Heggie’s Dead Man Walking which played at the Met last season. Since Dallas, Leonard Foglia’s dynamically effective production has since traveled to Canada and Australia as well as other U.S. cities. It has now arrived, expanded for the Met’s huge stage, teeming with life aboard the Pequod ship as it sails to its final doomed encounter with its target.

Robert Brill’s evocative set, replete with elaborate rigging and billowing sails, augmented by Elaine J. McCarthy’s striking animated projections, sometimes makes it difficult to spot the principals among the many sailors, but Foglia is usually successful in foregrounding the five around whom the opera focuses.

A crucial decision by the opera’s creators—one which ultimately lessens Moby-Dick’s impact—has been to dilute the character of Ahab. It’s his obsession to find and kill the great white whale that propels the action, but we gain few insights into his compulsive monomania. The audience is invited to learn more about the inner lives of Greenhorn and Queequeg, Pip and Starbuck than Ahab. Brandon Jovanovich’s blank, if stentorian, interpretation of the Captain further distances us from the opera’s crucial prime mover. Heggie’s lush, sometimes explosive writing for the orchestra also prevents many of Ahab’s words from coming across so that we glean little insight into the impulsive decisions that result in the deaths of everyone on board except Greenhorn. Ahab’s sentimental duet with Starbuck just before the cataclysm attempts to humanize a man who has long since lost any compassion toward others.

We learn more about the concerned, fearful Starbuck whose ravishing aria of indecision closes the first act. The young Pip, a trouser role for the opera’s sole female cast member, gets a lively scene depicting his trauma when he’s temporarily lost overboard. But Heggie and Scheer give the most attention to the soulful relationship between Greenhorn and Queequeg, whose earnest interactions may call to mind the homoeroticism noticed in much of Melville’s writing and which also figures prominently in another seaworthy work drawn from Melville: Britten’s Billy Budd. 

Peter Mattei was to have performed Starbuck at the premiere but withdrew due to illness: he was replaced by the confident American baritone Thomas Glass. Where Mattei and Jovanovich would have interacted as peers, Glass’s youth brought a special poignance to a character with his whole life ahead of him. The delightful Janai Brugger shone as Pip, her voice growing richer as the voyage progressed, particularly in her moving lament with Stephen Costello’s Greenhorn as Ryan Speedo Green’s Queequeg died.

Costello, who created his role in Dallas, and Green developed a palpable chemistry as two outsiders who find a connection in the chaos of the Pequod. Though physically separated high above the ship’s deck during their watch, the pair sang a piercingly lovely duet hoping for a future that will never be. A plangent Costello, who can sometimes seem distracted onstage, fully embodied the lonely Greenhorn in one of his best outings at the Met. Initially, Green sounded out of sorts, frequently covered by the wall of sound allowed by conductor Karen Kamensek, but he eventually found his footing.

One of the most striking Moby-Dick performers never appeared on stage. Singing from a side box, Brian Major’s rich baritone resounded as the desperate Captain Gardiner whose ship passes closely by the Pequod. Though she sometimes failed to rein in her vibrant orchestra, Kamensek otherwise led a taut and exciting performance that reveled in the lusty choruses that dot the score. I don’t remember seeing Tilman Michael, the Met’s new chorus director, taking a bow earlier in the season, but he and his hearty forces definitely earned their ovations after both Moby-Dick and Fidelio.

Before Moby-Dick began, Met General Director Peter Gelb stepped onstage to invite all to stand for the Ukrainian National Anthem. The Met has been quite vocal in its support for Ukraine during the ongoing war and one understood why the company chose the season reopening for this gesture. But the stirring anthem might have been more apt the following evening as Fidelio is a mighty work depicting the struggles of ordinary citizens against a tyrannical regime.   

Absent from the Met since 2017, Fidelio returned in Jürgen Flimm’s stark 2000 production. Revived by Gina Lapinski, it looked better than it had eight years earlier, though she retained several of the late director’s worst ideas, such as beginning the glorious reunion duet “O namenlose freude” with Leonore and her now-rescued husband Florestan inexplicably positioned on opposite sides of the stage.

This season’s revival happened primarily due to the availability of Lise Davidsen, currently the world’s leading Leonore. She was originally set to perform her role of the heroic wife who disguises herself as a man to rescue her husband from prison at the Met during the fall of 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, but the pandemic closure thwarted that production. Visibly pregnant—with twins!—the soprano will step back from performing after the Fidelio run to await her children’s birth before returning to the Met next March for a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. 

If Davidsen on opening night sounded at slightly less than her sterling best, her nobly committed Leonore still rang out with thrilling conviction. In addition to her expected ringing, house-filling ringing notes, she also tenderly brought softly subtle shading to the heavenly quartet with Marzelline, Jaquino and Rocco and to the heartfelt “Komm Hoffnung” section of her big “Abscheulicher” aria.

The only cast member to match her was René Pape returning to the role of Rocco for the first time since he appeared in the Flimm production’s premiere nearly a quarter-century ago. If his plush bass has been reduced slightly in size, it remains sure and steady as he embodies all the contradictions of the jailer increasingly uncomfortable with his duties.

Although debuting tenor Magnus Dietrich as Jaquino acquitted himself reasonably well, he never suggested why he merited his Met invitation for this easy-to-cast role. On the other hand, Ying Fang’s sweetly vivacious Marzelline reminded us why she’s an invaluable artist who should be at the Met every season.

In the dark prison, David Butt Philip as Florestan began with a startling messa di voce in his opening “Gott!” and then confidently proceeded through to his aria’s frenzied conclusion. If his brightly sizable tenor had trouble keeping up with Davidsen’s radiant Leonore, he negotiated Florestan’s challenging music better than some other current exemplars.

Although Tomasz Konieczny was a convincingly hissable villain, his Pizarro was sung with such an ugly bass-baritone that one almost wished that Davidsen’s Leonore had pulled the trigger when she had the chance. Konieczny seems to have been going through a bad time dating back to his uneven Met Der Fliegende Holländer in 2023. His presence next season as both Mandryka in Arabella and Kurwenal in the new Tristan becomes concerning.

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Susanna Mälkki on the podium would ordinarily be a cause for rejoicing as she’s led some fine performances at the Met, but her Fidelio was occasionally frustrating, even puzzling. A fleet Overture was followed by often quite deliberate tempi choices that sometimes worked, sometimes lost focus undone by unexpected brass bloopers. The final chorus of rejoicing flew by so quickly that the soloists, chorus and orchestra struggled to stay together. An additional rehearsal or two might not have been amiss.

One hopes the remaining performances will jell so that the final show on March 15—scheduled to be transmitted in HD to theaters around the world—will at last be all that this promising Fidelio could be. Unfortunately, no HD has been scheduled for Moby-Dick, which runs until March 29, when it will be the weekly Saturday afternoon broadcast.

In the mid-1600s, a young Italian arrived in Paris and soon transformed the still-evolving art form of opera into something quintessentially French. More than three hundred years later, a harpsichordist born in Buffalo, New York, also came to Paris and had a similarly seismic effect on the performance and appreciation of 17th- and 18th-century French opera. That musician, William Christie, turned 80 in December, and the explosion of gala celebrations honoring him touched down in New York City late last month.

Atys, an opera by Florence-born Giovanni Battista Lulli, later known as Jean-Baptiste Lully, proved the vehicle that would turn Christie’s group Les Arts Florissants (LAF) into one of the world’s most sought-after ensembles offering “historically informed performances” (HIP) of baroque vocal music. Lully’s operas, though acknowledged as historically important, were generally dismissed as uninteresting and thus rarely revived or recorded. However, in 1987 LAF mounted a gripping production of Atys, and suddenly, French baroque opera became a hot ticket.

Founded in 1979 and named after a short opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, another nearly forgotten composer that Christie has consistently championed, Les Arts Florissants first performed in New York in 1987 with a modest program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two years later, however, a large contingent of soloists, chorus and orchestra brought a lavish Atys to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and since then, Christie and his musicians have appeared nearly annually at BAM, Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall.

Christie and LAF were not the first to delve into the rich body of sacred and secular vocal music written in France between 1660 and 1760, but their bracingly dramatic yet intensely elegant approach has resulted in revelatory performances of masterpieces by Lully, Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau, in addition to stage works by Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel. The group began recording for Harmonia Mundi in the mid-1980s and their extensive discography on that label and, later on, Erato welcomed listeners to musical riches most had never heard before.

Commemoration of the maestro’s 80th began last year with grand stagings in Paris of Charpentier’s Médée and Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé. 

Christie then embarked on a busy concert tour showcasing highlights of his long career. For its only appearance in the U.S., Les Arts Florissants arrived at a dramatically reconfigured Zankel Hall on January 28 with a small group of instrumentalists and six singers drawn from Le Jardin des Voix, the ensemble’s much-acclaimed young artists program now celebrating its twentieth year. The concert opened with compelling excerpts from Médée; though the noted composer Nadia Boulanger recorded highlights from the score in the early 1950s, LAF’s full-length version on three CDs truly reintroduced Charpentier’s powerful score—which predated by more than a century Cherubini’s better-known opera by the same name—to 20th-century audiences.

British mezzo Rebecca Leggatt opened the concert with an aching, affecting portrait of Charpentier’s betrayed sorceress in tense dialogues with Juliette May as her confidant Nérine and then Bastien Rimondi as the faithless Jason. Eschewing the minimally accompanied secco (dry) recitatives found in Italian opera seria, early French operas employ organically flowing recitatives that transition seamlessly into more expansive arias or duets (and sometimes dances or choruses) accompanied either by a small continuo group or the entire orchestra.

Throughout the Zankel evening, Christie’s singers urgently declaimed their texts with crisp diction, which was particularly helpful as Carnegie Hall kept its auditorium’s lighting so dim that few could make out the generously provided twenty-two pages of texts and translations!

Excerpts from Atys followed–beginning with its celebrated sleep sequence “Sommeil d’Atys.” The hypnotic trio was begun by a plangent Richard Pittsinger, an American tenor who will participate in the 2025 edition of Jardin des Voix. He was joined by Rimondi and baritone Mathieu Walendzik who themselves were joined by Serge Saitta on traverse flute and Yanina Yacubsohn and Nathalie Petibon on recorders—together, they wove a hushed, magical spell. That moment in particular was no doubt fondly recalled by anyone who experienced Atys when it was performed at BAM in 1989, 1992 or 2011: the final run was the gift of a wealthy American fan who just had to see it one more time!

The seamless ninety-minute program concluded with a medley of familiar moments from five Rameau operas, including two brilliant solo showpieces: the florid “Règne, Amour” from Pygmalion and La Folie’s over-the-top satirical aria from Platée. In the former, Rimondi suavely negotiated the elaborate coloratura, while as La Folie, the gamely flamboyant Ana Vieira Leite only occasionally gave into the temptation to mug and pout.

Throughout the evening, Christie didn’t conduct per se but performed as a member of the ensemble at the harpsichord and organ. Cueing was done by concertmaster Emmanuel Resche-Caserta to a band that included David Simpson on basse de violon, a longtime LAF veteran since Atys. While the crew of eight string players worked well for Lully and Charpentier, they sounded rather thin in Rameau’s sumptuously colorful instrumental music.

The instantly infectious “Forêts paisibles” from Les Indes Galantes brought the printed program to a close, but it was quickly followed by the ravishing “Tendres amours,” a frequent LAF encore. It originates as a brief quartet also from Indes but much expanded into an ensemble for all the singers with full orchestral accompaniment.  

Each celebratory concert has featured special surprise guests (Natalie Dessay and Laurent Naouri popped up at a December Philharmonie de Paris event), and New York welcomed Joyce DiDonato, who recounted her anxiety about performing for Christie for the first time when she starred in LAF’s production of Handel’s Hercules two decades earlier. Despite her nervousness, the experience proved to be exhilarating and one which helped to propel the American mezzo to international prominence. As her tribute, she joined the musicians in a slow but intensely moving “As with rosy steps” from Handel’s Theodora.

Ten days before the Zankel Center Stage concert, Christie led a Handel-Rameau program at the Juilliard School, an institution with which he’s had strong ties since the school began its sterling Historical Performance program in 2009. Soon after its founding, the student ensemble named itself Juilliard415 after the traditional lower concert tuning pitch adopted by many for baroque music. Christie has been an annual participant in the program; in addition to private interaction with students, he has led public concerts, most significantly offering captivating readings of rare early Handel works composed during his brief stint in Italy. Eager singers and instrumentalists have joined Christie in rare and excellent opportunities to perform Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Le Resurrezione, and Aminta e Fillide. 

This year’s Juilliard415 Handel program was far less exotic: familiar arias from Alcina and Giulio Cesare sung by soprano Song Hee Lee sandwiched between movements from one of the Opus 6 Concerti Grossi. String intonation in the concerto was uncomfortably inconsistent, but Lee sparkled in “Tornami a vagheggiar” and “Da tempeste” to which she added some unusual and elaborate ornaments, including a very long cadenza with violin and recorder that culminated in a long and striking high E-flat.

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After intermission, the orchestra found stronger footing in French music and displayed much more stylish playing in suites from operas Castor et Pollux and Dardanus, the latter the one major full-length Rameau masterpiece that Christie and LAF have yet to perform. Lee was even better in the Rameau excerpts, singing with winning delicacy. Christie took special note of her ease in this challenging repertoire and predicted success for her if she continued with it.

The rare and interesting repertoire that Christie has embraced has consistently surprised and delighted New York audiences for nearly four decades. However, a concert by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, an acclaimed HIP ensemble from the UK, at the 92nd Street Y that happened between Christie’s pair of appearances seemed oddly like a return to the days when “exotic” baroque music was only presented in easily digestible tidbits. Though the large group led by first violinist Kati Debretzeni played with snappy zest, frequent chatty introductions by band members about very familiar works turned the evening into something awkwardly intended for beginners.

We got Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba;” just one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; and the third of Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos. Chestnuts like Pachelbel’s “Canon” and Bach’s “Air on a G String” were sometimes followed by less familiar pieces like Telemann’s Hamburger Ebb und Fluth (but just four movements of the prolific composer’s ten-section “Water Music”) and one movement of a Vivaldi double-cello concerto. The last bit happened because the group’s trumpeter was unfortunately absent, as he was still recuperating in hospital from an accident that occurred earlier in the tour in California.

The missing trumpeter also meant that soprano soloist Julia Bullock had to duet instead with oboist Daniel Bates in Handel’s exultant “Let the Bright Seraphim,” The soprano who was so impressive last season in recital at the Park Avenue Armory seemed at sea in her surprisingly brief appearances that evening with the OAE. She began uncomfortably with a mezzo aria from Handel’s Alcina and concluded the first half with “Da tempeste,” the same bravura aria from Giulio Cesare that Lee had offered with Juilliard415. However, Bullock’s coloratura proved dully efficient rather than dazzling. One wondered if this aria might have been included to remind audience members that Bullock will soon appear at the Met as the same Egyptian queen in John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra?

She spoke to the audience about her choice to perform Barbara Strozzi’s “Che si può fare?” yet despite an eloquent Sergio Bucheli on the lute, Bullock made little of the words and sounded distressingly hooty. Her brief aria from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen was pleasant enough, but it was awkwardly placed between two fizzy orchestral pieces by Lully and Rameau. French baroque reappeared in Bullock’s encore, a swift ditty from Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Céphale et Procris. Never before have I experienced a singer reading their encore from a score: a disappointing end to a dispiriting evening.

Christie has taught us to expect better. LAF will later this spring tour to twenty-one U.S. cities, including New York, on April 6 with an all-Vivaldi program featuring young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte; however, Christie will not be on board. But his fans can dive into hours and hours of music performed by him and LAF at home, thanks to the recent release of a deluxe box set containing their entire Erato catalog. Sixty-one CDs can be had for less than $200—the baroque bargain of the decade!

Struggling to understand what I’d just witnessed at the Metropolitan Opera on New Year’s Eve, I strode onto Lincoln Center Plaza in a torrential downpour and suddenly thought of the Gypsy revival that recently opened twenty blocks to the south. Perhaps because the director of the evening’s new production of Aida is Michael Mayer, the Tony Award-winning Broadway regisseur, I imagined that when offered the job of producing Verdi’s perennial masterpiece, he thought of Gypsy’s second-act show-stopper, “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.”

How else can one explain his mystifying concept of framing an engrossing opera of love, war and death in ancient Egypt with the explorations of a silent band of early 20th-century archaeologists? During Verdi’s prelude, a harnessed Indiana Jones-lookalike descended in a pool of light to the stage floor and discovered a dagger (remember that dagger!) and marveled at the hieroglyphics he saw. After Ramfis and Radamès entered, the lead explorer vanished. From then on, with one important exception, he and his fellow archaeologists became so peripheral to the action that, for long stretches, you forgot about them completely.

Perhaps their inclusion was Mayer’s weak attempt to make his otherwise utterly traditional, entirely conventional Aida more relevant by attaching itself to opera’s recent struggle with its long fetishization of “exotic” cultures. Only once do his actors enter directly into the opera’s action. During the monumental Triumphal Scene, the “modern” figures parade through the spectacle bearing a wide array of gold statues, the spoils of their expedition. After intermission, they receded again into the background, only occasionally resurfacing to observe the opera’s riveting action, a conceit that only alienated us from the opera’s principals. The observers’ most off-putting inaction occurred in the opera’s tragic final moments when Indiana and his female colleague watched dispassionately as Aida and Radamès succumbed in the tomb and the grieving Amneris committed hara-kiri, presumably with the very dagger he had clutched in the opera’s first minutes.

Mayer’s long-postponed production replaces Sonja Frisell’s much-loved 1988 vision, whose passing was mourned with much regret. Its recent revivals more than thirty years after its premiere were plagued by casts appearing to have had little guidance beyond rudimentary blocking. Hopes that Mayer would provide more detailed direction were quickly dashed as his singers looked as if they were left largely to their own devices, falling back on clichéd stock gestures addressed to the Grand Tier rather than to their colleagues and nearly always from the very front of the stage.

The lack of guidance was most noticeable in Angel Blue’s vulnerable Aida, a relatively new role for her. The sympathetic soprano can be a persuasive actress when given strong direction, as in Porgy and Bess, but here her Aida was far too modest and unassertive, offering few glimpses of a proud Ethiopian princess suffering under Egyptian domination. Happily, she sounded in refulgent voice, sending gleaming high notes into the Met’s vast space. If her middle and chest registers didn’t bloom as excitingly, she showed a firm grasp of her role’s fierce demands.

Perhaps as the run continues into the spring, Blue will bring more specificity and bite to her words, mirroring those of her father. Amonasro, the captured king, was fiercely embodied by Quinn Kelsey, whose entrance late in the second act briefly shocked the placid proceedings into vivid life. He seethed with anger, darkening his vibrant high baritone and briefly sparked Blue to greater urgency in their anxious, wrenching duet, which proved the most gripping sequence of the evening.

The wisdom of Piotr Beczala’s taking on the punishing dramatic role of Radamès was hotly debated before the opening, but those reservations weren’t answered as the elegant, earnest tenor was sick for the opening and probably shouldn’t have performed at all. The Met’s general manager Peter Gelb made an announcement about his illness and thanked him for continuing, but many in the audience may not have been as grateful. He continued to crack, transpose notes down an octave or just omit them entirely, which inevitably nonplussed his partners and dampened the music’s effect.

Beczala must be under an unlucky New Year’s Eve star as he withdrew from 2023’s Carmen premiere and then missed several further performances. The tenor, who turned 58 on December 28, had been in fine voice for his Carnegie Hall recital earlier in December, so his disastrous Radamès mustn’t be perceived as a sign of decline. Why he was encouraged to begin—and then continue—remains a troubling mystery, particularly in front of a snazzily dressed audience paying top dollar for a less-than-gala premiere.

As Ramfis, Dmitry Belosselskiy too sounded ill, his bass muffled and unassertive. Perhaps due to Belosselskiy’s indisposition, Morris Robinson, who will take over the role of Ramfis later in the season, dominated his scenes as the King of Egypt rarely does. While Yongzhao Yu made little of the Messenger’s urgent narrative, Amanda Batista brought a brightly promising soprano to the role of the offstage Priestess.

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After her disappointing debut last season as a miscast Preziosilla in the new La Forza del Destino, Romanian mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi returned to the Met as an extravagantly melodramatic Amneris, the scorned Princess of Egypt. Her outsized performance won cheers from some for its no-holds-barred flamboyance, particularly in contrast with the introverted Blue and the struggling Beczala. Her singing, however, was wildly unpredictable. Sometimes high notes rang out clearly and on pitch—more often, they inched worryingly sharp. Her occluded middle often wobbled, and the chest notes could sound more like speech than singing.

Given Beczala’s precarious condition, Yannick Nézet-Séguin led an unusually cautious Aida, though many passages revealed a fleet, entrancingly transparent view of the score. His musicians responded to him with a polished sheen. The several dance sequences once again brought out a delicately lively side of the conductor; however, Oleg Glushkov’s campy ballet for twenty lithe bare-chested and -legged undulating men should be repurposed for the next edition of Broadway Bares. Donald Palumbo returned from retirement to prepare the chorus for this new production, and his male contingent was in particularly thrilling form.

Given the bland predictability of Mayer’s production, the Met might just as well kept its venerable Frisell version, which showcased Gianni Quaranto’s massively convincing sets. But Christine Jones’s new sets, abetted by 59 Production’s elegant and colorful projections, looked wonderfully evocative, as did Susan Hilferty’s striking costumes. The physical production will serve the company well, but the unnecessary archaeologists will surely wear out their welcome as quickly as Alfredo’s intrusive mute sister did in Mayer’s “Disney” Traviata.

The big question remains as to why Mayer was asked back to direct one of the Met’s most popular works when his two previous Verdi productions—the notorious 1950s Las Vegas Rigoletto (which has already been dumped for Bartlett Sher’s even less successful Weimar mess) and the Traviata eyesore—have been consistently reviled. One hopes cast changes happening later this season will help us love the opera while tolerating another Gelb misfire: this cast continues through the HD on January 25. Christina Nilsson will later debut as Aida, and the eagerly anticipated returns of Elina Garanca and Amartuvshin Enkhbat for Amneris and Amonasro are scheduled for late April.

Throughout December, Messiah is nearly inescapable in New York City churches and concert halls. To explore some of the many options available to eager Christmas Handelians, I attended four of the city’s best-known versions and found them remarkably different yet often deeply satisfying in their individual approaches to this perennial masterpiece.

It’s perhaps surprising that Handel’s Messiah has become so closely associated with Christmas as it is most appropriately performed at Easter. Though Part One does involve the Nativity, the work’s most celebrated number—“The Hallelujah Chorus”—closes the second section and celebrates Christ’s resurrection. But at Easter, one is likely to instead encounter Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, another sacred baroque landmark.

As Handel’s Italian operas began to lose favor in London in the 1730s, the German-born composer turned more and more to English-language oratorios, choral works on religious subjects. Handel composed a good number of them, but Messiah differs markedly from the rest. Saul or Theodora, for example, are music dramas featuring characters interacting much as they would in an opera. But the soloists in Messiah, set to Biblical excerpts from the King James Version assembled by Charles Jennens, aren’t portraying individuals but are instead relating incidents in Christ’s life and death. This unusual presentation allowed Handel to tinker with his work after its 1742 Dublin premiere, and he often changed the arias and recitatives based on the soloists available to him at the time. Eventually, a more or less standard version was adopted, and the Messiahs I heard performed at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, Trinity Church, David Geffen Hall and Carnegie Hall were consistent in allocating the solos.

Otherwise, the four varied considerably in the kinds of instruments used and, most crucially, in the size and makeup of their choruses. St. Thomas and Trinity employed period-instrument ensembles: New York Baroque Incorporated and Trinity Baroque Orchestra, respectively. Though the number of orchestra members remained roughly the same among the four performances, the pair employing instruments modeled on those from Handel’s time played with more bite and color than did members of the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestra of the Oratorio Society of New York on modern strings, winds and brass. The use of “historically-informed performance” (HIP) approaches at St. Thomas and Trinity also aligned with their warmer, more reverberant church acoustics.

The make-up of the four choruses accounted for the most striking differences between performances. St. Thomas is noted worldwide for adhering to the Anglican tradition with its Choir of Men and Boys. Adorned in scarlet robes, twenty-one boy sopranos combined with thirteen adult altos, tenors and basses to produce, under Jeremy Filsell’s direction, a uniquely ethereal sound. Though they mostly stayed in tune, the boys proved the biggest obstacle to my enjoyment of Filsell’s striking interpretation. Though many in number, together they produced a sometimes weakly pallid sound in Handel’s many demanding choruses. By comparison, Trinity’s contingent of eight adult female sopranos under Dame Jane Glover’s dynamic leadership soared thrillingly, though their avoidance of vibrato (a common HIP technique) might have sounded odd to those unfamiliar with “straight tone.”

The securely forthright forty members of Musica Sacra joined the NY Phil in a tidy though bland Messiah thanks to Ton Koopman’s safely unassertive vision of the score. The choral textures came across most clearly in Geffen’s clean acoustic, which also emphasized the strong but overly homogenized sound of the modern-instrument orchestra. Kent Tritle, who prepared the Musica Sacra chorus, was also the conductor of OSNY’s Carnegie Hall presentation in which he commanded its mighty chorus of nearly one hundred and eighty voices! Despite their number, in Messiah’s first section, they produced a softer, more diffuse sound than Trinity’s twenty-six! But with the subsequent drama of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, they came alive and grew in unanimity and force as they approached “Hallelujah,” which produced the expected burst of wild applause from the Geffen crowd which obediently stood—as did all four audiences—for that rousing number. Remarkable, too, was the precision of OSNY’s big group, which devoutly executed the many challenging florid passages that dot Handel’s music.

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The difficult coloratura of the bass arias in Messiah nearly defeated several of the soloists. St. Thomas’s David Soar, a recent Wagnerian veteran, labored mightily through his music, sounding most comfortable in his concluding “The trumpet shall sound.” For the NY Phil, baroque specialist Klaus Mertens lightened his sound with some success to negotiate the clusters of black notes, but OSNY’s Joseph Parrish fared best, his vibrant bass-baritone tackled his music with reasonable agility and bite. Trinity’s traditional unique solution to Messiah’s solos is to assign each to a chorus member, a practice which inevitably resulted in some unevenness but brought a moving warmth to the evening. Of its bass members, Steven Hrycelak and Enrico Lagasca stood out in their solos.

Trinity’s tenor Andrew Fuchs began the performance with a particularly stylish “Every valley,” so different from Rufus Müller’s intensely dramatic if worn traversal of that opening aria. In the remainder of his music, Müller’s welcome intensity brought back memories of his much-acclaimed Evangelist in Jonathan Miller’s landmark staging of the St. Matthew Passion. Joshua Blue’s operatic repertoire includes works by Verdi and Puccini which might explain his unusually muscular approach to Handel for OSNY. He did, however, demonstrate a commendable ease in the more elaborate pages of his music. For the NY Phil, Kieran White’s light tenor was taxed by some of the more dramatic moments in Part Two, but his clear diction and hearty engagement made him shine among Koopman’s bumpy quartet.

The four performances split Handel’s alto music between women and men. St. Thomas’s Emily Marvosh often sounded disappointingly thin, but her arresting way with the words made her “He was despised” particularly touching. Trinity presented both mezzos and countertenors with the former crew winning the laurels. Koopman brought along Dutch countertenor Maarten Engeltjes whose delicately hooty instrument left scant impression, while Tritle countered with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, perhaps America’s best countertenor, whose vibrant and seamless voice stands apart from many in his vocal category. However, Cohen sounded less than his usual best at Carnegie Hall; alone of all the soloists I heard, he referred intently and often to his score and sometimes sounded a bit unsure. Yet his innate musicality and burnished voice still made much of Handel’s superb alto arias.

Nola Richardson, OSNY’s soprano, often performs 18th-century music, but her thin, wiry voice proved strangely off-putting for much of the evening. However, she was transformed in Part Three, where her “I know my redeemer liveth” and “If God be for Us” were truly lovely. Koopman’s Maya Kherani, too, was uneven, beautiful phrases alternated with harsh high ornaments, and she ultimately made little impact. For St. Thomas, Emily Donato surprised by taking on with easy élan the rarely heard bouncy alternate version of “Rejoice greatly.” She beautifully partnered Marvosh in “He shall feed his flock.” But the single finest solo of my Messiah Marathon was Elisse Albian’s ravishing “I know my redeemer liveth” at Trinity: simply heaven-sent.

Only OSNY performed Messiah in its entirety, giving Cohen and Blue the sole opportunity to duet in “O death, where is thy sting,” during which Carnegie Hall staff quietly scurried to remove an audience member in the front row who had fainted. Koopman made the oddest cuts: inexplicably omitting “His Yoke is easy” at the conclusion of Part One and the tenor’s aria just before “Hallelujah.” Both St. Thomas and Trinity removed several important numbers from Part Three, fearing that some of its crowd might find the remainder of the work anticlimactic after “Hallelujah.” In fact, Tritle chastised audience members he spotted fleeing before Part Three began.

The 2024 Messiah Palm must go to Dame Jane, whose tirelessly energetic leadership of her Trinity forces (she’s 75!) made Handel’s long-familiar work sound fresh and new with her commandingly propulsive reading that brought out the best in her really excellent orchestra and chorus. The intimacy of Trinity with 650 seats, fewer than one-quarter the capacity of Carnegie Hall—added to its specialness though its uncushioned pews can prove challenging during the nearly three-hour running time.

But each of these fine long-running Messiah traditions—some going back well over one hundred years—assure that their sold-out audiences will be thrilled and touched by Handel’s oratorio for either their first—or twentieth time!

In recent years, the Metropolitan Opera has asked artists to respond to the company’s new productions. Their creations are then transferred onto enormous banners that adorn the opera house’s façade. However, between the closing of Ainadamar and the opening of Michael Mayer’s reimagining of Aida due on New Year’s Eve, the Met’s banner on display features a photograph of Giacomo Puccini above the composer’s signature. This outsized tribute commemorates the centenary of the composer’s death on November 29, 1924. In addition to the banner, the Met offered on November 12 an unusually interesting gala performance of Puccini’s Tosca that would prove to be greater than the sum of its very disparate parts.

Why these extravagant gestures to Puccini? While celebrations connected to an artist’s birth are quite common, making a big fuss over the anniversary of their death happens far less frequently. But opera houses, particularly in the United States, owe much to the Italian composer whose ever-popular works have been programmed more and more frequently as companies continue to struggle to recover from crippling closures caused by the pandemic.

As many of Puccini’s operas are easily accessible and feature poignant stories of tragic love set to memorably soaring melodies, nearly every season of even the smallest opera company contains at least one: La Bohème, Madama Butterfly or Tosca are the most commonly performed with the larger companies also venturing the more demanding Turandot. And, unlike most masterpieces by, say, Mozart or Verdi or especially Wagner, these operas contain around two hours or so of music that novice audiences may appreciate.

The Met, which scheduled nearly sixty performances of four of the composer’s works last season, has long had a special connection to Puccini. That relationship was examined in a dazzling new short film by 59 Productions that was shown before Tosca. Directed by Tony Wexler and narrated by Peter Clark, the Met’s archivist, the gala audience was swept into the first decades of the twentieth century when Puccini’s operas were the newest Met hits. The composer first visited New York in 1907 to oversee the company’s first Manon Lescaut and the U.S. premiere of Butterfly. The film concisely evokes Puccini’s enthusiasm for the city, a fascination that culminated in the Met’s world premiere of La Fanciulla del West in 1910. The film ends with a mention that World War I prevented Puccini from returning to New York and oddly omits any mention of Il Trittico, which in 1918 also had its world premiere at the Met.

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After the film, the eagerly expectant audience was primed for a Tosca that included a number of important firsts. In August, the Met announced that Yannick Nézet-Séguin had extended his contract until 2030. That was scarcely a surprise, but the bigger news was that over the next few seasons, the Met would be remounting Wagner’s Ring and Tristan und Isolde, all directed by Yuval Sharon and starring Lise Davidsen. Since the banishment of Anna Netrebko, no singer has ignited Peter Gelb’s enthusiasm like Davidsen, whose Tosca, her first Puccini role at the Met, was the gala’s most highly anticipated centerpiece.

Portraying her lover Mario Cavaradossi was British-Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso in his Met debut. Davidsen and De Tomasso have appeared frequently together, a match made in the boardrooms of Universal Music Group as both have exclusive contracts with Decca Records. Corporate pairings like these used to be common, from Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano or Renata Tebaldi and Mario Del Monaco to Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. However, not since star couple Netrebko and Rolando Villazón fizzled has a pair been so earnestly packaged together as Davidsen and De Tommaso, who collaborated in Tosca this fall in Berlin and Munich before coming to the Met and will do so again in Vienna next month.

But the Met’s Tosca revealed that the pair are not especially well-matched. Davidsen’s Leonora in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino earlier this year at the Met and European reports of her Tosca led many online commentators to opine that the Norwegian soprano lacks the passionate Italianate style that De Tommaso delivers in spades. At the gala, they appeared more like a comfortably bourgeois couple rather than a volatile, passionate pair. Tosca’s mild fit of jealousy over the Attavanti portrait seemed more like an amiable old joke between them. One of the most refreshing aspects of Davidsen’s Tosca was that, rather than offering up the familiar tempestuous diva, she gave us a younger, more vulnerable woman plunged into a maelstrom she’s not prepared for.

De Tommaso, on the other hand, relied on shallow “leading tenor” poses, frequently gesturing to the topmost balcony begging for applause, like at his long-held high B-flat in “Vittoria” and especially at the end of his overwrought, sob-ridden “E lucevan le stelle.” His robust swagger and evident grasp of Puccini’s style might have been more impressive had he sung more of the correct notes. Intonation lapses were frequent, and perhaps nerves kept his staid “Recondita armonia” earthbound. His unsubtle approach was a poor match with Davidsen’s scrupulously nuanced attention to Puccini.

Oddly, Davidsen displayed more electrifying chemistry with the superb Quinn Kelsey as Scarpia, her predatory nemesis. Their interactions throughout crackled with an electricity lacking between Davidsen and De Tommaso. Remembering that he’s a baron, Kelsey gave us a suave would-be seducer who, for once, could have been a real romantic threat to Cavaradossi. His high, supremely secure baritone pined with enraptured love (or was it simply lust?) for Tosca and only revealed his brutal side when torturing Cavaradossi. Just one unexpected moment of vulnerability manifested when just inches apart, Davidsen, taller than either man, lashed out in anger at Scarpia: for a second or two, Kelsey’s implacable Scarpia was afraid.

While Davidsen sang with expected security and blazing high notes, she failed to pull off a number of Tosca’s iconic moments because she refused to push her chest voice. When unable to listen to Cavaradossi’s screams any longer, she revealed Angelotti’s hiding place meekly, almost inaudibly. Her softly intoned “Quanto? … Il prezzo?” to Scarpia also lacked fiery disgust, as did her “Muori dannato” to the dying Baron, though she stabbed him with breathtaking ferocity.

She began “Vissi d’arte” softly and skillfully built it to an unusually explosive climax; she was always able to easily soar over the too-frequent crests of Nézet-Séguin’s explosive orchestra. The music director, who had not led Tosca earlier this season, failed to present a coherent vision of the opera. The first act, in particular, emerged in fits and starts. The second act, however, brimmed with a propulsive urgency that kept the audience breathless but not his singers.

Stage and pit often got out of sync, unsurprising as this gala Tosca clearly suffered from too little preparation time. Davidsen had been in Munich performing the second act of Tristan for the very first time, so she arrived in New York just a week before Tosca opened. Kelsey concluded his enthusiastically received run of Rigoletto four days before his second-ever complete Baron Scarpia. The three principals, all new to the blandly conservative production David McVicar created in 2017 as the longed-for correction to Luc Bondy’s earlier, much-disliked vision, had even less rehearsal time together than usual mid-season recastings—and it often showed.

However, the audience (which appropriately included Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraìn, star and director of Maria, the upcoming film on Netflix about Callas that prominently features “Vissi d’arte”) greeted the performers with long, loud and lusty cheers. One prays things will have jelled by their fourth and final performance together on November 23, which will be beamed in HD to movie theaters worldwide. Puccini at the Met continues with more Toscas in January, with Sondra Radvanovsky returning to the title role and many more Bohèmes—nineteen in all!

The big announcement about plans for Davidsen in Wagner also mentioned that the soprano will be opening the Met’s 2026-27 season with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, co-starring Kelsey as her ambitious spouse. From a photo taken at the fancy Tosca afterparty, the pair is already plotting.

January will mark the 50th anniversary of beloved tenor Richard Tucker’s sudden death at the age of 61. The foundation created soon after his passing has become one of the most important organizations supporting young American opera singers. Since 1978, the foundation has given out the Richard Tucker Award (now worth $50,000) to a talented performer well on the way to becoming a leading presence at opera houses worldwide. Beginning in 2000, dozens of the best and brightest have been supported by substantial career and study grants from the foundation. During the final week of October, performances at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera amply demonstrated the ubiquity of Richard Tucker Foundation alumni.

Lisette Oropesa (Tucker Award recipient in 2019) made a rare New York City appearance for her Carnegie Hall recital debut at Zankel Hall late last month, collaborating with pianist Ken Noda in an attractive program of Spanish and Spanish-influenced music. To the frustration of her many U.S. fans, for the past decade, Oropesa has spent most of her time in Europe, where she has evolved into a major star specializing in bel canto and 19th-century French operas.

In the first half of her program, Oropesa visited Spain by way of Ravel, Delibes and Massenet. The soprano tossed off their dazzling florid writing with élan plus rows of effortless trills that many of her colleagues would kill for. Though the soprano has always shown a keen stylistic affinity for French music, on this occasion, her cloudy diction lacked hoped-for incisiveness, though this wasn’t an issue in her bewitching wordless Ravel “Vocalisse-étude en forme de habanera.”

In the familiar coloratura showpieces “Les filles de Cadix” and “Sevillana,” Oropesa eagerly seized on all the high acuti, though more often than not, they emerged jarringly pinched. Though it was a treat to hear the familiar Bolero from Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes in its original French, Oropesa’s bumpy rendition plodded rather than danced though she wisely didn’t attempt the high E-natural others have added at the end.

Beginning with four haunting selections by Joaquín Nin, after intermission, Oropesa relished subtle nuances in the Spanish selections, though once again, her words could have been clearer. Presumably, her status as a bel canto specialist leads her to choose music with lots of high notes. The most attractive part of her voice is its distinctive middle with its very individual quick vibrato.

The program concluded with Roig’s “Entrada de Cecilia,” one of the selections included in Oropesa’s new, remarkably brief CD (just 44 minutes!) of zarzuela arias. Her earnest renditions at Zankel and on the recording of the Roig and Chapi’s better-known “Carceleras,” however, lacked the necessary charm. However, for her encores, Oropesa turned to opera arias and revealed an intensity and emotional involvement that had been missing earlier. Her pleading “Robert, toi que j’aime” from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable built slowly to its shattering climax, while her surprising final number, a delicately spun  “Casta diva” from Norma, once again emphasized the beguiling elegance of the middle of her voice. One prays, though, that the rumors that she will soon take on the dramatic title role of Bellini’s Norma are untrue.

While Oropesa hasn’t appeared with the Met at Lincoln Center for several years, two other Tucker Award winners—Michael Fabiano and Jamie Barton—were on hand when Il Trovatore had its season premiere at the Saturday matinee. Also featured were Tucker grant winners Rachel Willis-Sørensen and Ryan Speedo Green, as well as Russian baritone Igor Golovatenko. All five were performing their roles at the Met for the very first time.

Thanks to Daniele Callegari’s vividly propulsive conducting, Verdi’s sometimes preposterous tale of doomed love and intractable vengeance whizzed by aided immeasurably by David McVicar’s intensely focused production (still his best Met work) in Charles Edwards’ evocative revolving set.

Continuing his exploration of a more demanding tenor repertoire, Fabiano brought his familiar arresting intensity to his first-ever Manrico. Though he has in the past appeared distractingly self-absorbed on stage, this time Fabiano brought a welcome warmth to Manrico’s fervent attachments to the women in his life. While he ably negotiated “Ah sì, ben mio,” the strenuous demands of its cabaletta “Di quella pira” (one verse only) found Fabiano stretched to his limits. The next day, we learned that he had sprained his ankle exiting after its exciting, if strained, final note.

Barton as his “mother” began the afternoon in restrained form. Though she skillfully recounted Azucena’s devastating narrative of her mother’s fiery death in “Condotta,” she sounded underpowered when duetting with Fabiano’s more vibrant “son.” After intermission, Barton bravely stood up to aggressive treatment by Golovatenko and Speedo Green and found her best form in the final act’s haunting nostalgic duet with Fabiano. Barton’s Azucena emerged less deranged and more maternal than many, but her final triumphant cry of vengeance boldly rang out as the lights went out.

One can often easily ignore Ferrando’s opening narrative while awaiting Leonora’s entrance, but Speedo Green told a transfixing, troubling tale. As the rabidly jealous di Luna, Golovatenko, so fine last season in the new La Forza del Destino, attacked his music with a careless brusqueness that blunted his character’s tender aria “Il balen.”

After being away for more than five years, Willis-Sørensen returned to the Met as Leonora. While her warmly dark soprano has grown since her previous Mozart appearances with the company, she uneasily launched into her first aria that rose to bright high notes quite different from the middle. She handily negotiated the coloratura in both her shortened cabalettas, and her low, fervent utterances during the “Miserere” were her finest moments. To face the violent world she inhabits, McVicar’s Leonora responds with nervous impetuosity, frequently falling or being thrown onto the ground. Willis-Sørensen’s coolly awkward portrayal proved jarringly at odds with Fabiano and Golovatenko’s brutal physicality.

I could have followed the afternoon’s Trovatore with more Met Verdi in the evening: Rigoletto again cast almost entirely with Tucker Award or grant winners: Nadine Sierra, J’Nai Bridges, Stephen Costello and Quinn Kelsey. I skipped it, and Costello canceled, but the other three turned up the next evening for the annual Richard Tucker Foundation Gala at Carnegie Hall.

Throughout most of its history, the gala was performed with orchestra and chorus. However, like many arts organizations, the Foundation was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic; in order to conserve its financial resources, it has for the past two years presented its starry roster of singers accompanied by piano only, played this year by either Bryan Wagorn or Howard Watkins.

Though I missed Rigoletto, we were treated Sunday evening to Sierra and Kelsey’s intimately moving rendition of that opera’s second-act duet. Earlier Sierra previewed a new Puccini role with a tender “Mi chiamano Mimi” hindered by too much portamento. With his grandly commanding “Eri tu,” Kelsey reminded us that his betrayed Renato was the strongest feature of last season’s Met Un Ballo in Maschera.

Willis-Sørensen previewed her Norma, a new role she’ll attempt soon at the Berlin Staatsoper, first with a very slow “Casta diva” (like Oropesa’s without its recitative or cabaletta) during which she and Wagorn too often operated at different tempi. Then she joined Barton for a rousing yet more unified “Mira, o Norma.”

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The auditions for the Richard Tucker Career Grant and the Sara Tucker Study Grant take place each spring at the 92nd Street Y and are open to the public. I attended this year’s Career Grant auditions when many worthy singers offered their pair of arias. The decision by the judges must have been very difficult, but the three best singers (all under 30) did indeed win, and two joined Sunday’s gala lineup. Tenor Anthony Léon (who also won the worldwide Operalia competition) offered a winningly plangent “Una furtiva lagrima,” while Elena Villalón teased the Gavotte from Manon so seductively that the eager audience burst prematurely into applause TWICE before she reached her smashing final high note.

Villalón came to the gala directly from that afternoon’s Ainadamar at the Met, as did surprise guest Angel Blue (Tucker Award recipient in 2022), who brought a heartfelt “America the Beautiful” coupled with “Lady by the Harbor“ by Lee Hoiby. The encores included a cringe-worthy snippet of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s misbegotten Little Island Marriage of Figaro, though the ever-eager countertenor redeemed himself with a bouncy “I Got Rhythm” duet with Sierra that concluded with him hopping into her arms! Speedo Green’s moving a capella “Deep River” and Sierra’s luxurious “Beautiful Dreamer,” sung intimately on the piano bench to Wagorn, felt special, as did Barton’s sweetly endearing “It’s You I Like“ by Jake Heggie.

The night before Halloween, the Met continued its winning run of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar in which Villalón remained a radiant Nuria, while Gabriella Reyes (2019 Career Grant and 2018 Study Grant winner) took over from Blue as Margarita Xirgu. Reyes had previously starred in her role in the same Deborah Colker production at the Detroit Opera. Xirgu dominates the opera of revolt and remembrance though Reyes at first was challenged by the opening scene’s low tessitura as well as by Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s aggressive conducting and Mark Grey’s complex sound design. Later, however, when placed closer to the audience and away from the microphones, the shimmering beauty of Reyes’s soprano stood out, and she gamely participated in Colker’s exciting choreography. Toward the end, Reyes blended divinely with Villalón and Daniela Mack as Lorca in a ravishing and stirring trio that transcended the similar, saccharine ensemble that concludes The Hours.

Clay Hilley, the Foundation’s 2024 Tucker Award winner, was conspicuously absent from this week’s New York City events because the rising heldentenor was performing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin Deutsche Oper!