As Idamante - marked by his father, Idomeneo, as the sacrifice to Neptune - the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey’s tone was elegantly hooded, a little smoky and shadowed. The soprano Ying Fang, indispensable at the Met in Mozart, sings with both silky warmth and agile sparkle as Ilia, a Trojan princess in love with Idamante, the prince of Crete, where she’s been taken as a prisoner. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s neo-Classical staging is still imposing at 40, and clever in its play of ruins and scrims.

Some frenetic scenes hadn’t yet settled into lock step on Thursday, but this was a very fine performance. Indeed, the subtlest, most plainly beautiful passages were among the best, like the glistening dawn as Katerina and Sergei woke up after the Dies Irae-ish crashes of her father-in-law’s funeral, and the soft, grim brooding of the convicts on the way to Siberia in the final act. Shostakovich’s huge score surges from brooding quiet to deafening fierceness, and Wilson led the orchestra in those shattering brassy marches without being overbearing, and in the stretches of stunned lyricism while keeping the music taut and tense. While Wilson, who is married to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is an experienced conductor, there were some grumbles when the season was announced about a plum gig going to the boss’s wife.īut the quality of her work on Thursday spoke for itself. When Sergei first seduces Katerina and she limply resists, singing, “I’m a married woman,” Sozdateleva conveys the line’s strange cool tenderness it’s not sincere, but it’s not a joke.Īlso making a notable company debut was Keri-Lynn Wilson, on the podium. Her voice becomes strident and slicing as it rises in pitch and intensity, but it’s never ugly.

In an excellent Met debut, the soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva is seen-it-all yet soulful, and often magnetically still, as if dazed by the world veering around her.

But the opera is dominated by Katerina, its scheming Lady Macbeth.

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