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    ‘Norma’ and ‘La Traviata’ Return to the Met Opera

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    Sonya Yoncheva doesn’t fill out the long lines of “Norma” at the Met, while Angel Blue is a warm, sincere Violetta in “La Traviata.”“An irresistible force drags me here,” a character says of the man she loves in Bellini’s “Norma,” which was revived at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday with the soprano Sonya Yoncheva in the title role. “The breeze echoes with his dear voice.”Every opera, of course, wants the voices in it to be irresistible forces, echoing in our minds; that is the point of the art form. But in the bel canto works of the early 19th century — of which “Norma,” from 1831, is a lasting masterpiece — vocal quality is more than a want. It’s a need.Particularly in the monumental title role. Norma is a descendant of Medea, a character who opened the Met’s season in Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera. Both are women wronged by their lovers and contemplating the murder of their children; both are figures of immense, mystical stature. And in both works, the drama lies in the breaking down of their authority: the revelation of an archetype, a myth, a goddess who is also a woman.In bel canto works like “Norma,” the protagonist’s grandeur, the heights from which she falls, are established by the soprano’s vocal technique, by the long, confident musical lines she spins. Bellini’s orchestra is subtle and sensitive, but austere enough that this opera’s stakes are purely vocal. If the score isn’t sung beautifully, it’s not simply bad — it’s almost nonexistent, which is the case in the Met’s drab revival.Over the past decade, Yoncheva has risen from a series of last-minute fill-ins to solo recitals on the Met’s stage and starring roles in new productions, including Umberto Giordano’s 1898 potboiler “Fedora” this past New Year’s Eve. But even for an established leading lady, Norma, which Yoncheva first sang in London seven years ago, is a daring proposition.As this druid high priestess, caught in a forbidden love triangle with a Roman soldier and a fellow priestess, Yoncheva can be forceful in declamation — the singing that’s more like speechifying. And she’s long been able to convey the sense of a character thinking as she sings.But crucial to this score, as to all bel canto, are the seemingly endless, time-defying lines that, on the revival’s opening night, she struggled to sustain, with an unsettled vibrato and big, gulping breaths breaking up core arias like “Casta diva.” Without powerful, poised, flexible singing — “beauty of tone and correct emission,” as Lilli Lehmann, a great Norma, put it — we feel none of the necessary awe for the character. So her fall from grace and the opera she dominates both lose their meaning. While Yoncheva doesn’t betray Bellini’s score, she doesn’t fill its sails, either, and the boat stagnates.The result is a kind of pencil sketch of “Norma” — not imprecise, but colorless. Yoncheva has coloratura agility, retained from her early days as a Baroque specialist, and isolated high notes pop out clearly. But when those notes are the climaxes of arching lines, they’re thin. She is spirited and scrupulous, and her voice is not ugly, but it’s inadequate for this music.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva comes to the Met’s latest revival of “Norma” after rising from a series of last-minute fill-ins to solo recitals on the Met’s stage and star turns in new productions.Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaShe neither loses control nor takes real command. And it’s not just strength you can’t convey if you’re not vocally in command as Norma; it’s weakness, too. Yoncheva spends much of the time blandly moping around, small-scale on this soaring canvas.With Maurizio Benini conducting briskly on Tuesday, the rest of the cast, too, lacked the suggestion of the epic. The wayward Roman warrior Pollione is the second big part in a much-anticipated Met season for the acclaimed tenor Michael Spyres, and the second disappointment. There’s a tarnished-bronze, baritonal nobility to Spyres’s voice, but strain in reaching the high register, and a kind of fogged wooliness just below.As Adalgisa, who unwittingly becomes Norma’s romantic rival, the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova makes the warmest outpourings of sound onstage, and her classic duets with Norma are neatly done. The bass-baritone Christian Van Horn presses out muscular tone as Oroveso, Norma’s father. In the small role of Clotilde, Norma’s aide, the soprano Brittany Olivia Logan sings with creamy urgency.The sighing “ba-dum, ba-dum” motif in the prelude to Act II anticipates Verdi’s “La Traviata,” which premiered just 22 years after “Norma” and mines that same motif for the same pathos. But by midcentury, operatic orchestral music had increased in density and complexity, and had begun to develop into a character in its own right. And “Traviata,” which returned to the Met on Saturday afternoon, is a far more naturalistic melodrama than the carefully antique, stylized “Norma.”So, unlike “Norma,” “La Traviata” makes its impact — it breaks your heart — pretty much no matter what. (By Giordano and Puccini’s time, 40 or 50 years later, operas were even more indestructible.) Which is not to say that “Traviata” can’t be derailed by its star. Or that it doesn’t bloom with an excellent one, like the soprano Angel Blue, who took on the role of Violetta at the Met on Saturday.The tricky curlicues and fast lines of the first act are sometimes not quite secure for her, and in “Sempre libera,” which brings down the Act I curtain, she exudes vague contentedness rather than bigger, riskier feelings. But even in those opening scenes, she is a warm presence — warm vocally, too, but with a quickly vibrating shimmer to her tone that keeps the sound buoyant and refreshing.There is no cynicism or hardness to her conception of the role, just the woundedness of a quick-smiling woman who has trusted too easily. Blue’s Violetta is always human-size, even in full, rich cry in her confrontation with Germont, the bourgeois father seeking to tear his son away from a liaison that threatens the family.She shows restraint in the third act, not milking the music for extra emotion. Her “Addio del passato” was brisk and bleak; her “Gran dio,” angry rather than pleading. The irrepressible Nadine Sierra and the scorched-earth Ermonelo Jaho offered accomplished Violettas at the Met earlier this season, but the sweet, sincere Blue — who lets the tragedy patiently unfold — may be my favorite.The tenor Dmytro Popov is an earnest, ringing Alfredo; as his father, the disapproving Germont, the baritone Artur Rucinski sometimes forces his seductive tone. In tiny parts, Megan Marino is a sprightly Flora, and, over 600 performances into his Met career, Dwayne Croft (here Baron Douphol) still brings a hearty voice and dramatic investment every time he steps onstage.Michael Mayer’s vulgar production drags down the opera. In the first act, Alfredo warns Violetta, “The way you’re living will kill you,” which makes no sense if, as here, the opening scene has all the demimonde danger of a Hamptons garden party. And, in this period setting, the visibly contemporary labels on the bottles of bubbly come across as yet more lazy summer-stock falsity in a staging full of it.But the show is surprisingly bearable with Blue’s tender honesty at its center. More

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      Review: The Met Opera Found an Audience for ‘Fedora.’ For Now.

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      Worries about the company’s future were momentarily stilled at a festive gala premiere on New Year’s Eve.The mood was festive, the audience large and enthusiastic, for the gala premiere on New Year’s Eve of a rare new production of Umberto Giordano’s lovably preposterous potboiler “Fedora” at the Metropolitan Opera.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva and the tenor Piotr Beczala, playing aristocrats locked in a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals, passionately loved and raged; the conductor Marco Armiliato and the Met’s orchestra brought restrained silkiness out of the pit; David McVicar’s staging was bustling and handsome. A good time was had by all.But I couldn’t quiet a tiny voice of dread in me. Not about the celebratory scene on Saturday evening, but about what it will be like when the Met tries to get its money’s worth out of the new production and revives it, with far less marketing and press coverage and quite possibly a less starry cast. Who will be in the audience for that “Fedora” in a season or two or three?The question has extra urgency after the coal that arrived in the Met’s stocking the day after Christmas, when the company announced that weak ticket sales and recalcitrant donors as the pandemic drags on would force it to raid its endowment to the tune of $30 million — a full tenth of the fund’s value — and to cut 10 percent of its planned performances next season.As a silver lining, the Met said at the same time that it would immediately expand its presentations of contemporary operas, which have been outselling some of the classics.Yoncheva plays a Russian princess in the late 19th century who swears vengeance after her fiancé is killed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in truth, what has been selling at the house is what gets promotional resources and media exposure: new productions, be they of brand-new pieces or 125-year-old ones like “Fedora.” Without that kind of publicity, attendance was particularly dire this fall for revivals of masterpieces that are hardly obscure but not quite “Aida,” like Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes” and Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” This could very well be the fate of “Fedora,” too, when it’s brought back.There is a real audience for the Met, as sold-out runs of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have proved. Just not so much for a pillar of opera-going: hearing repertory pieces as they evolve, year in and year out, with different casts. It is, sad to say, an ever-smaller group of people who care to see “La Traviata” subtly but unmistakably transform with each new Violetta — or “Fedora” with each new Fedora.That is why the 10 percent trim in performances for next season is a portent of what’s to come. The Met’s long-term future may well consist of seasons with significantly fewer performances of significantly fewer titles, and a greater proportion of new stagings to returning productions.That model, which would edge the Met closer to an annual event like the Salzburg Festival from its repertory-house tradition, may yield some strong artistic results. But the transition to it will involve a tumultuous rethinking of the company’s costs, and therefore its labor contracts, as well as fewer dismally selling revivals like this season’s “Idomeneo,” “Peter Grimes” and “Don Carlo” — all of which were excellent and all of which are integral to the Met’s responsibility to its art form.Even if this “Fedora” is never revived, we will at least have had a sensitive, spirited run of a work that last came to the Met in the 1996-97 season, when it was a vehicle for the great diva Mirella Freni’s full-production farewell to the company.“Fedora” is about as opera as opera gets. The title character (Yoncheva) is a Russian princess in the late 19th century who swears vengeance after her fiancé is shot to death. The plot, of course, thickens. It turns out that the killer, Count Loris Ipanov (Beczala), did not commit the crime for political reasons, as everyone assumed. (The dark specter here, as in Dosteovsky’s “Demons” and the Coen brothers’s “The Big Lebowski,” is nihilists.) No, Fedora’s man was making it with Loris’s wife, setting off a jealous gunfight; once that is revealed, enmity between princess and count turns to lust.This being a tear-jerker, their brief idyll is smashed when her prematurely sent letter of accusation inadvertently results in the death of Loris’s brother and mother, leading to his ferocious condemnation of Fedora and her overhasty suicide by the poison she keeps in a cross around her neck. (Don’t you?)The play on which this dead-serious farrago is based was written by Victorien Sardou, the reigning French master of theatrical sensation, who was also the source for Puccini’s “Tosca” around the same time. Giordano, Puccini and other Italian composers who came of age in the 1880s and ’90s have become known to posterity under the catchall “verismo,” a term which came to suggest a style of sumptuous orchestral complexity and moment-by-moment emotional responsiveness, with arias and other numbers that emerge and recede organically rather than formally — at least compared to Italian opera as it had been before — but with a melodic lushness that set them apart from Wagner.The gawkier sibling to its better-known predecessor, Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” “Fedora” is not a perfect piece. The roles other than Fedora and Loris are thoroughly unrewarding. The high spirits with which Giordano opens the second and third acts, for all-too-obvious contrast with the intense drama to come, drag on too long. There is an aria about Veuve Clicquot champagne, and an aria about bicycles, both thin.But for all its absurdity, the pairing of Fedora and Loris can catch fire with committed singers. It goes without saying that this can be an opportunity for wild-eyed scenery chewing. As fun as that can be, it is to Yoncheva, Beczala, Armiliato and McVicar’s credit that a sense of classiness and dignity prevailed on Saturday.Sometimes too much. For some of the opera Yoncheva seemed a bit, well, collected amid all the shattering revelations; nothing really seemed to faze her. And her high register tended to lack not volume but richness, so her climactic exclamations were less than harrowing.But she had far more vocal presence here than in her pale turn as Élisabeth in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” (in French) at the Met last season. Her dark-hued, resinous, trembling-vibrato soprano has an inherent morbidity, haunting in both Fedora’s longer lyrical lines and speech-like parlando. She is superbly articulate even in tiny moments: Near the end, she sees the tragedy that is unfolding and tells her friends, practically murmuring, “Andate, andate pure” (“Go, just go”).After audibly warming up through his brief aria “Amor ti vieta,” long beloved of tenors, Beczala sang with his usual stylish ardor. Among a sprawling cast, the robust baritone Lucas Meachem (as the diplomat De Siriex) and the bright soprano Rosa Feola (Countess Olga) did their best in bland supporting parts. Bryan Wagorn, a veteran of the Met’s music staff, had a turn as the Chopinesque pianist who plays at a party as Fedora and Loris confront one another.Armiliato’s conducting was notable for bringing out the score’s dynamic range; much of this orchestral performance was subtle and delicate, rather than the blaring blood-and-guts that is still the verismo stereotype.This is somehow McVicar’s 13th Met production since 2009, and its main concept is a straightforward logistical one: Each of the three acts — the plot moves from St. Petersburg to Paris to the Swiss Alps — expands the grand, airy set (by Charles Edwards) a chunk further upstage. As in McVicar’s staging of another verismo-era work, Francesco Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve four years ago, there is a suggestion of the blending of domestic and theatrical spaces. His most idiosyncratic interpolation here is the pale figure of Fedora’s murdered fiancé, who wanders around haunting her; whatever.The color scheme of the costumes (by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), largely black and white, unfortunately restricts what should be a smashing palette range for Fedora’s gowns, though Yoncheva looked splendid in the cinched-waist, heavy-bustle cuts.In the first act, she wears a dramatic raven-color dress, with a many-diamonded tiara. Diva entrances rarely get the old-fashioned reception at the Met these days, so to hear the audience erupt in applause as she first came on was delightful enough to momentarily still that tiny voice of dread in my head about the company’s future. At least for the couple of seconds it took for her to stride across the stage, cool and confident, basking in the ovation, it was New Year’s Eve, it was one of those works that warms any true opera lover’s heart, and all was right with the world.FedoraThrough Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: ‘Don Carlos’ Finally Brings French Verdi to the Met

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the sprawling masterpiece, which is being presented by the company for the first time in its original language.Wait, I know I’ve seen this opera before, you may have been thinking as you opened your program at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. It’s the one with the prince in love with his stepmother, right? And his jerk of a father, and that big duet with his friend, and the Spanish Inquisition?But there it was, in black and white: “The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Don Carlos.’”Rarely has a single letter been as significant as that final “s.” The opera that audiences here have seen — the one that has been staged at the Met more than 200 times — is “Don Carlo,” its libretto in Italian. The performance on Monday, though, was being given in the work’s original French.In either language, it is Verdi’s largest, shadowiest masterpiece — and particularly somber on Monday, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continued and the evening opened with the audience rising in silence for a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem by the Met’s chorus and orchestra. Center stage was Vladyslav Buialskyi, a young Ukrainian bass-baritone making his company debut in a tiny role, his hand on his heart.This is, after all, an opera that opens with the characters longing for an end to fierce hostilities between two neighboring nations, their civilians suffering the privations caused by the territorial delusions of a tiny few at the top. The geopolitical battles fueling the plot’s private agonies seemed more vivid than usual as David McVicar’s new production was unveiled.A new production, sure, but a Met premiere? That’s dubious, since almost all of the music will be familiar to anyone who’s heard “Don Carlo” there over the past four decades.But it is nevertheless a milestone for the company to be finally performing the work in the language in which it premiered, at the Paris Opera in 1867. Verdi worked with inspired diligence to shape his musical lines to metrical rhythms subtly different from Italian. For this adaptation of Schiller’s freely ahistorical play, set at the 16th-century Spanish court of Philip II, he painted the sprawling canvas of French grand opera in his own brooding colors.Alas, “Don Carlos” was a mixed success in France, and Verdi continued to revise it over the next two decades, as it premiered and was revived in Italy. (And since this was a time when librettos were commonly translated into the language of the audience, it was performed in Italian, as “Don Carlo.”) The eventual result was a smorgasbord of versions, from which opera companies can now freely take elements.But as Will Crutchfield recently wrote in The New York Times, those versions boil down to essentially two: “The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois.”Yoncheva, center left, hand in hand with Etienne Dupuis as Rodrigue in the spectacular auto-da-fé scene that places “Don Carlos” in the French grand opera tradition.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met has more or less done the 1884 version since a landmark production there in 1950 reintroduced the opera to the standard repertory after decades of neglect. The piece had circulated largely in Italian, and was done in New York exclusively in that language. The big news came in 1979, when a new Met staging restored that 1867 Act I. Hence the five-act form in which “Don Carlo” — with tweaks here and there — has been presented ever since.And always in Italian. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin led a new production in 2010, it was in Italian, and when that production was revived, it was in Italian — even as major houses around the world had broken with that tradition.But Nézet-Séguin suggested that he wanted to conduct the piece in French. Now, as the company’s music director, he has made it so. It speaks to his passion for the score that this is the first opera in his still-young Met career for which he is leading a third run, and his conception of it — long-breathed, patient, light-textured — embodies the vast elegance of French grand opera.Those qualities are crucial in supporting a triumphant turn in the title role by Matthew Polenzani, singing Carlos for the first time in either language. Polenzani is not the swaggering, trumpeting Franco Corelli-style tenor generally associated with the part — though he rises, stylishly, to fiery intensity — but rather a vocalist of refinement, inwardness and melancholy.And throughout the work French conveys all of that better than Italian. The classic duet of brotherhood between Carlos and his friend, Rodrigue, the Marquis of Posa, is a loudspeaker announcement in Italian, as “Dio che nell’alma infondere.” In French, as “Dieu, tu semas dans nos âmes,” it feels far more intimate, a cocooned moment on which the audience spies. Particularly in this performance, with the smooth-toned, seductive baritone Etienne Dupuis as a Rodrigue uniquely able to draw close to him the hapless, isolated Carlos.As Élisabeth, who is betrothed to Carlos before being married to his father as part of the peace settlement between France and Spain, the soprano Sonya Yoncheva lacks tonal richness, but her slender, focused voice penetrates, and it fits her interpretation of the character as coolly dignified, even chilly, enough to endure the sacrifices she has made.The mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, her high notes blazing and her chest voice booming, with just a slight loss of ease in between, sings with generosity and acts with liveliness as the princess Eboli, whose unrequited love for Carlos inspires her vengeance, then her contrition. As the implacable Grand Inquisitor, the bass-baritone John Relyea has stony authority.Jamie Barton as the vengeful then contrite princess Eboli.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDupuis, standing, with Eric Owens as King Philippe ll, the tyrannical but melancholy ruler of Spain in the opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe only weak link is the bass-baritone Eric Owens as King Philippe, his voice dry and colorless, his face and presence inexpressive, problems that also dogged his recent Met performances in “Porgy and Bess.” He renders one of the most nuanced characters in opera — a man of tremendous power, vulnerability, anger and confusion — a cipher.The silky, articulate bass Matthew Rose is luxury casting as the monk who — stick with me — might actually be Charles V, Philippe’s father, who is (at least presumably) recently dead. Why isn’t Rose singing Philippe?This is the safe, dependable McVicar’s 11th Met production, with two more (“Medea” and “Fedora”) to come next season. His “Don Carlos” is spare, straightforward, largely traditional and largely neutral, dominated by grimly rough, curved, looming stone walls pocked with semicircular openings, as if the characters — costumed in richly embroidered black — were wandering through a catacomb.I wish McVicar and Nézet-Séguin had restored the first act’s opening section, performed at the Met from 1979 to 2006, which shows Élisabeth among the suffering people of France. It deepens the conflict she faces not long after, when she is forced to decide between her duty to them — the marriage to Philippe that will end the war — and her love for Carlos.At least that crucial first act is here. There is a case to be made for doing the opera in Italian, as it will be when this staging is revived next season. But that revival will also revert, for the first time since the early 1970s, to the four-act version, a dismal decision that the Met should reconsider.Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth is contrasted with his closeness to Rodrigue throughout the performance in David McVicar’s staging.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMcVicar does offer a few welcome idiosyncrasies. An acrobatic jester figure, his face painted skull-white, restores to the auto-da-fé scene some of its intended spookiness. And, after contrasting Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth with his closeness to Rodrigue all evening, McVicar ends the opera with the dying Carlos being greeted by his already dead friend, who lowers the prince to the stage in what feels very close to implying posthumous, well, union.The scoring of that moment is the most obvious of the handful of ways in which this performance diverges from how the opera has been heard at the Met since at least the 1950s. The 1884 ending, a fortissimo blast over which Élisabeth’s voice soars, has red-meat appeal, particularly if your soprano has a boffo high B.But that is otherwise an all-too-thrilling conclusion to a bitter, ambivalent opera that ends better in the 1867 version’s sober quiet, with monks softly chanting about Charles V being reduced to mere dust. It is the sound of history drifting on, past any and all human lives, played and sung here with the delicacy and gravity that made this a special night for Nézet-Séguin and his company.Don CarlosThrough March 26 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      A Day of Divas

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      Two star sopranos, Renée Fleming and Sonya Yoncheva, held court in two of New York’s grandest venues on Sunday.A little imperiousness? A lot of extravagance? A touch of the supernatural?You could try to come up with the recipe for a diva, but you just know one when you see it. Or hear it: In an appraisal of André Leon Talley this weekend, the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman described his words as those “of a diva, uttered at a time when divas were going out of style.”Out of style, perhaps, but not out of existence. In fact, I read that appraisal on Sunday as I was getting ready for a day of rare diva alignment, with two star sopranos holding court in two of New York’s grandest venues: Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, and Sonya Yoncheva at the Metropolitan Opera in the evening.If you were looking for evidence of the demise of the diva — at least of the stereotypical variety — it’s true, neither of these seemingly genial, generous women came across as imperious. And clutch your pearls: Fleming didn’t even change gowns at intermission.But divadom still shows signs of life. It’s in tiny things, like this sentence in the program at Carnegie: “Ms. Fleming’s jewelry is by Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z.” And at the Met, when Yoncheva sang the phrase “ta première larme” (“your first tear”) in a Chausson song, she slowly raised her hand to her face, as if she really believed she was wiping that larme away. Sometimes, even in opera, it’s the gesture that makes the diva.In a gesture of becoming modesty, Fleming shared a reasonably crowded stage for the most prominent part of her concert: the New York premiere of “Penelope,” an account of the wife who waits very, very patiently for Homer’s Odysseus to return from the Trojan War.The soprano Renée Fleming, center, was joined on Sunday at Carnegie Hall for the New York premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s “Penelope” by (from left) the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet and the actress Uma Thurman.Chris LeeLeft unfinished at the death of its composer, André Previn, in 2019, the piece was stitched together from manuscript sketches and drafts of Tom Stoppard’s text. The 40-minute result is as talky as a Stoppard play but far less sparkling or affecting. Its tone mostly pseudo-archaic, this is pretty much just an “Odyssey” in extreme digest, lightly backed by the Emerson String Quartet and the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.There are so many words that many of them were assigned to be spoken, to shorten the running time. Thus the title role was split between a singer and an actress (at the premiere three years ago and here, the movie star Uma Thurman).Thurman is a natural at intoning amid the wispy thatches of underscoring, and she sometimes tries to inject some attitude into the dry libretto. But it’s never quite clear why the role has been divided. Couldn’t a single performer just shift between speaking and singing? The bifurcation works only to dilute interest in both parties.Fleming is game, even if she doesn’t get to take lyrical flight: The soprano part is almost entirely recitative — sung narration — and never blossoms into aria or gives us any real sense of Penelope’s character or emotions. There are reminders of Previn’s stylish facility, as when a quietly swirling little quartet interlude slips into a minor-key whisper of “Here Comes the Bride” before modulating, almost quicker than you can hear it, into gentle satisfaction. But mostly the music seems scant and exhausted trying to keep up with Stoppard.It followed intermission; earlier, the Emerson played Barber’s 1936 Quartet, dedicating it from the stage to Roger Tapping, the superb Juilliard Quartet violist, who died last week. Dinnerstein rolled out the deliberate arpeggios and rushing surges of Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush,” and accompanied Fleming in a set of five songs altogether more memorable than “Penelope.” The first, Grieg’s lively “Lauf der Welt,” didn’t play to this singer’s mellow strengths, but his “Zur Rosenzeit” very much did.Fleming is 62, but there is still considerable richness in the middle of her voice, and her dips into low notes were done cleanly, without the syrupy scooping for which she was once often criticized. In the wistful quiet of “Zur Rosenzeit” she was moving, almost vaporizing the second syllable in “meinem Garten” (“my garden”) for the touching effect of the past vanishing as she remembered it. Fauré’s “Les Berceaux” had discreet, dusky power.And she was earnestly impassioned in “Evening,” Kevin Puts’s new setting of a Dorianne Laux poem, most charming in a middle section with a Joni Mitchell vibe: a deliberate, repetitive piano riff anchoring a free and easy vocal line. (Fleming takes the Meryl Streep role in Puts’s coming operatic adaptation of “The Hours.”)Yoncheva’s solo recital on the Met stage was a sign that she had swiftly risen to become one of the company’s core artists.Ken Howard/Met OperaAt the Met, Yoncheva was given one of the dearest gifts the company can bestow on a valued artist: a solo recital on its stage. And at 40, she has become valued with dizzying swiftness. Though she jumped into a few memorable revivals starting in 2013, it was only when she opened the 2015-16 season, in Verdi’s “Otello,” that she cemented her place in this house; at the end of February, she will star in a new production of “Don Carlos.”On Sunday she displayed the ease with which she can fill even the vast Met with an encompassing mood: darkly nostalgic and death-haunted, as you’d expect from her melancholy repertory. Even her sensuality brooded, compellingly joyless; Malcolm Martineau’s relative effervescence at the piano placed her gifts in high relief.Her voice is supple but lean. It feels like an instrument, in the most literal sense: a vehicle of expression rather than a remarkable sound in its own right. It has a low center of gravity and a quality of intimacy; Yoncheva gives the sense of singing to herself even when she’s not being soft.As she began with a set of French songs by Duparc, Viardot, Chausson, Donizetti and Delibes, her high notes were thin and stiff. Indeed, throughout the evening those notes above the staff were a problem, mostly when she had to rise to them through a long musical line. Stabbed out of the air, loud ones had startling fullness and clarity.But from the first number — Duparc’s “L’Invitation au voyage” — her interpretive intentions were intriguing, as she stretched the poem’s vision of “luxury, calm and delight” into a clear, forbidding premonition of the afterlife. With Yoncheva, details are everything: In Duparc’s “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” the repetitions of “son retour” (“his return”) at the end of each verse had a different gauzy texture, subtly increasing the complexity and tension of the illusion that a lover will come back.A silvery sheen to “printemps” in Chausson’s “Le temps des lilas” gave a brief impression of dewy spring; there was grandeur in Donizetti’s “Depuis qu’une autre a su te plaire” without overkill. The Spanish-style ornaments in Delibes’s “Les filles de Cadix” weren’t dashed off for smiles, but were sung with intensity, turning what could be a throwaway number into an unlikely burning drama.In a second half of Italian songs, Yoncheva was dreamy in Puccini, though her voice wanted greater size and juiciness to fill out her epic conception of “Canto d’anime.” In works by Martucci, Tosti and Verdi, her phrasing had confidence and style, a carefully constructed but persuasive evocation of naturalness; though she had a music stand in front of her throughout the evening, she sang with focus and commitment.Tosti’s “Ideale” was particularly striking, its finale building from faintness to climax. Warmly received, she moved to classic arias for encores: a refreshingly unsappy “Donde lieta uscì” from “La Bohème”; a genuinely sexy, insinuating “Carmen” Habanera; and “Adieu, notre petite table” from “Manon,” tenderly mused.Oh, and she spent the first half in a black gown, billowing above the bodice, and the second in white — shiny satin throughout, a dream of a diva. More