La Fille du Régiment

Streaming and discussion begin at 7:30 PM.

For whatever hapless tenor gets assigned the plum role of the opera’s hero, Tonio—and the aria “Ah, mes amis” in which those nine notes are located—it’s the kind of vocal mountain only a troubadour with a blast-furnace for lungs could scale.

And yet the payoff is grand: as we learned last night from the Met’s latest revival of Laurent Pelly’s staging, people positively meet their maker over those notes, swooning, howling, applauding for minutes on end—especially when the aria appears as easy and secure as it did for Veracruz-born Javier Camarena last night, especially when the tenor finds it in himself to showboat with a dazzling encore of nine more C’s, as Camarena did. — parterre box

Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera