And Robinson’s characters aren’t consistent. Soprano Maria Kanyova (Tatiana in Robinson’s Onegin) conveys Adina’s intelligence and irony. But if she really cares for Nemorino, why does she dismiss him so unreservedly? Her later jealousy when her girlfriends suddenly find Nemorino attractive (they’ve learned he’s inherited a fortune) comes out of nowhere. And though Nemorino is a lovable booby, in his drunk scene, Met tenor Eric Cutler breaks into a series of dances (a two-step, a Charleston, even a vaudeville time step with a cane) that turn him into the Music Man. Character, schmaracter — why not go for a few easy laughs?
Kanyova has stage savvy and a more than serviceably pretty though not especially glamorous voice with dicy high notes. Baritone James Westman as Nemorino’s rival, the blowhard sergeant Belcore, and bass Dale Travis as the quack doctor Dulcamara (whose love potion is a bottle of rotgut) give amusing if generic performances. Young soprano Ji Young Yang, as a peasant girl, can probably sing a high Z, though she’s relentlessly arch. The excellent chorus is also full of characters.
The best voice is Cutler’s healthy, ringing, and agile tenor, and he’s acquired a new freedom on stage. The opening-night audience gave his “Una furtive lagrima” a big hand, though it lacked the long seamless line and imaginative phrasing that makes Nemorino’s amazement at learning he’s loved both comic and heartbreaking. Cutler seemed to be singing syllables. Ronald Haroutunian’s haunting introductory bassoon solo got it exactly right.
The biggest hand and a standing ovation went to conductor Stephen Lord. This is his last BLO performance after 17 years as music director. His Donizetti could hardly be more stylish, effervescent, and pointed. His contribution to the company has been incalculable.
The ante-penultimate program of the Cantata Singers’ extraordinary Kurt Weill season was one of music director David Hoose’s most inspired. It was illuminating to compare and contrast three very different works: Weill’s atonal Concerto for Violin and Winds (with the dazzling Jennifer Koh); the mysteriously insinuating lullaby of Ferruccio Busoni (he was Weill’s teacher) for his late mother, Berceuse élégiaque; and Brahms’s consoling, insistently non-dogmatic Ein deutsches Requiem. In 1924, Weill was resisting the kind of music that would soon make him famous, but the Violin Concerto also anticipates his familiar mixture of the spiky and the rhapsodic. Hoose and the marvelous players revealed the rarely heard 1911 Busoni to be a neglected landmark of rhythm, harmony, and color.
The Brahms, completed after the death of his mother, was deeply moving, especially in its quietest moments, the opening and closing “Selig sind” (“Blessed are they that mourn”; “Blessed are the dead”). Baritone Dana Whiteside was exemplary, but soprano Jennifer Foster seemed cast against ideal type — delivering overripe, not entirely pitch-perfect singing where you’d expect sublime tonal and vocal purity. Chorus and orchestra were radiant. (Special bravos to oboist Peggy Pearson, trumpeter Fred Holmgren, and timpanist John Grimes.) Hoose sometimes pushed them (albeit excitingly) beyond the comfort zone, but the way he got each passage to well up made you feel why Brahms chose these Biblical texts and, more important, what wisdom and emotion they offer.