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Review: Javier Camarena’s Days as Count Almaviva Are Numbered

From left, Javier Camarena and Pretty Yende in “The Barber of Seville,” at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times

Javier Camarena, who has one of the sweetest tenor voices in opera, is singing just two more performances of his calling-card role: the wily, debonair Count Almaviva in Rossini’s evergreen comedy “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” (You might know it as “The Barber of Seville.”) After shows on Friday and Jan. 18 at the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Camarena will retire Almaviva, the part that introduced him to audiences around the world.

Yet if you want to hear him — and if you love opera, you should — I wouldn’t take the bait and rush to this genial but scattered “Barbiere,” which opened at the Met on Monday. Instead, take a deep breath and wait a month. Starting on Feb. 10, Mr. Camarena will be starring alongside Diana Damrau, Alexey Markov and Luca Pisaroni in the company’s revival of Bellini’s gorgeous “I Puritani,” an altogether better showcase for his talents.

That is partly why he is giving up Almaviva. Mr. Camarena’s voice has changed, his publicist wrote in an email, and he’s moving on from Rossini’s fireworks to more lyrical parts, like Arturo in “I Puritani” and (for the first time later this year, in Barcelona) the Duke in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”

This reflects recent shifts in his voice, but his instrument has always been better suited to the arching, slow-burning lines of Bellini — which bloom when calm, steady breathing and melting tone are applied — than to Rossini’s machine-gun coloratura. While Mr. Camarena can get the job done in “Barbiere” — as he did, with just a bit of apparent effort, on Monday — Juan Diego Flórez, for example, dispatches Almaviva with more insouciant flair.

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A scene from the opera.Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times

But in a piece like Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” in which Mr. Camarena caused a sensation at the Met in 2014, he has few if any equals, guiding phrases with a poise that never feels artificial or mannered. “There is a huge difference,” he told me in an interview then, “between what I can do in Rossini and what I can do in a role like ‘Sonnambula.’”

He’s right. One of Almaviva’s most difficult numbers, the serenade “Ecco, ridente,” comes at the start, and Mr. Camarena seemed uncomfortable in it on Monday, uneasy on the final high note, pressured by the conductor Maurizio Benini’s aggressive tempo.

Mr. Benini seemed in general more interested in shoving than in guiding the performance, which unsurprisingly tended to veer off the rails. The fun in “Barbiere” is that the music always seems about to go haywire, not that it actually does; the tightness is where the humor comes from.

Any chuckles on Monday emerged, then, not from the high-wire precision of the music but from the broader gags in Bartlett Sher’s decade-old, putty-colored production. The performers were more amiable than inspired, even the charismatic Peter Mattei as the resourceful barber Figaro. As the fought-over Rosina, the demure soprano Pretty Yende’s gorgeous smile and silky, flexible sound — the vocal equivalent of the white handkerchief she carries — didn’t compensate for her lack of spunk or spice.

Maurizio Muraro brought old-school polish to the tongue-twisting patter of the overbearing Dr. Bartolo; the sly Mikhail Petrenko was an oily Don Basilio. And there was a promising debut by the chocolaty mezzo Karolina Pilou, in the tiny role of the housekeeper, Berta.

But mostly the performance whetted the appetite for Mr. Camarena’s Arturo. While “Barbiere” has the more popular name — and the cornier jokes — “I Puritani” is by far the greater opera. I’ll see you there.

Il Barbiere di Siviglia
Through Feb. 11, with cast changes, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan, Lincoln Center; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: His Days as Count Almaviva Are Numbered. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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