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But the piece isn’t just about nostalgia, it runs on nostalgia; its very coherence depends on our own ability to reminisce and recognize its tunes and textures throughout the performance as it dreamily unspools the tale of Paul, a man who agonizingly projects his grief and anguish over his deceased wife (Marie) onto a young and sexy dancer that resembles her (Marietta) against the backdrop of gloomy Bruges. (The opera is based on Georges Rodenbach’s novel and features a libretto by the composer and his father, Julius Korngold.)

Paul’s early encounter with Marietta gives us the opera’s most famous and most important tune, the oft excerpted duet “Gluck das mir verblieb” that Paul asks his new obsession to sing. (She does most of the singing, while done up as Marie – Sigmund Freud wept.) This ditty reappears throughout the opera – even during the opera’s second Act which takes place entirely in the bereaved Paul’s mind – and will eventually have a therapeutic effect on Paul after he finally strangles the boisterous Marietta with a preserved lock of Marie’s hair before snapping out of his nightmare and mournfully but decisively departing Bruges with his friend Frank.

If it feels like I’m beating a dead horse (or a child, if we want to stick with the Freud theme) with these two points, it’s because they’re important to understanding the opera and they couldn’t help but inform how I approached Christine Goerke’s patchy performance as Marietta. As the early duet fizzled, unsteadily sung, awkwardly negotiated, and its final high note flatting painfully as the all-important melodic line was scratched and smudged, I found my own nostalgia pulling me back a decade to 2015 when Goerke, along with the same Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, scorched the stages of Symphony and Carnegie Halls with that historic return-not-a-comeback Elektra.

Hilary Scott/BSO

In the almost ten years since then, the hochdramatisch diet has taken a toll on the voice even if the lovable soccer mom warmth of her general demeanor remains intact and wryly shone through with crispy text delivery as Korngold’s boisterous vamp. But it wasn’t until the opera’s final Act that she was singing with anything close of the security of those halcyon days and the organ-like warmth of her sound that made those early performances so memorable is now mostly waggy and unsupple. Goerke certainly has much left to give – though probably more in terms of personality than vocal capital – but while Paul’s relationship with “Gluck das mir verblieb” brings him closure, it brought me mostly disappointment.

As Paul (and substituting for a previously announced Brandon Jovanovich), David Butt Phillip’s handicaps had less to do with his vocal estate – his problems are all in his ceaselessly forced delivery. For the first five minutes, this fearless singing was quite exciting; this unhinged guy really sounded unhinged! But by the end of his lengthy Act I monologue, I realized that my prayers following my last encounter with Butt Phillip in 2021 had gone unanswered. This is a darkly handsome, full-bodied instrument with free ringing high notes but expressed with so much bluntness and pressure that he was red in the face by the end of the monologue. Seldom do the goods seem so misused as they do with this singer whose disinterest in subtlety or a dynamic below mezzo forte eventually just got boring.

Singers in smaller roles were persuasive when audible above Nelsons’s orchestra (Though this seemed more a fault of the singers than Nelsons.); Karen Cargill as Paul’s housekeeper Brigitta and Elliot Madore as his friend Frank both phrased boldly, though neither Cargill’s warm nor Madore’s tensile instruments were quite resonant enough to consistently break through the morass. Neal Ferreira, as Gaston, was a vibrant, dapper presence as he rivaled Paul for Marietta and Amber Monroe, Elisa Sunshine, Joshua Sanders, and Terrence Chin-Loy were a fine supporting quartet of the hallucinated theatrical hoi polloi with which Marietta fraternizes.

Hilary Scott/BSO

But this was, at least in theory, supposed to be the Orchestra’s evening. When a big and prestigious symphony attempts an opera in concert, what they’re doing is giving a tacet endorsement of the score as something higher than the rude world of theater. Last year, with a significantly more compromised prima donna, this goal remained clear. This year, I was less convinced; while this densely orchestrated score diaphanously flows, Nelsons’s more pronounced changes in tone suggested more heart monitor rather than a billowing silver sheet. He certainly didn’t wallow in the glittery churn, but if you’re not going to do that at least a little bit, then why bother with Korngold?

The emphasis on tension over narrative propulsion was perhaps what made this unbudging opera feel especially stuck in its protagonist’s mind, though the performance was not without its strong moments, especially the firmly shaped, cascading prelude to Act II and the rippling and gently detailed final moments as Paul and Frank depart to the celesta, tenderly played by Deborah Emery.

Of the other individual instruments, the trumpet of Thomas Rolfs provided several perfectly calibrated flourishes as did Vytas J. Baksys on piano and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the Boston Lyric Opera Chorus (BLO was listed as a co-producer of this event), and the Boys of the St. Paul’s Choir School sang with plenty of personality and dynamic specificity. It was a solidly competent evening – but seldom does my nostalgia find itself tending towards performances just ever so slightly stronger than the sum of their parts.