Erin Morley and Lawrence Brownlee Bring ‘Golden Age’ Flair to the Met’s ‘La Fille du Régiment’ Revival
Synchronicity between live performances and new recordings used to be quite common in classical music. Therefore, the October 17 opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of La Fille du Régiment preceded by the release of Pentatone’s Golden Age CD—both starring Erin Morley and Lawrence Brownlee—might seem a model of canny long-range planning. However, the singers confided to me that the recording’s genesis came well before the Donizetti comedy was on the Met’s schedule as one of this season’s bel canto highlights.
In April 2020, as a response to COVID-19 closing opera houses, the Met put together a live online “At-Home Gala” during which a dazzling collection of the biggest stars performed (often from their homes) for a worldwide audience. One particularly special segment featured Morley accompanying herself on the piano while singing an aria from La Fille du Régiment. I wondered if she had any inkling that she would be singing Marie at the Met five years later. Initially, she had hesitated to perform, but her father strongly encouraged her to participate. He believed, she told Observer that the At-Home Gala would be a moment of connection, a moment of light in the darkness. “The rush I felt singing “Chacun le sait” that day can’t be explained,” Morley told Observer, “and now, to sing the aria with the Met Orchestra—with my audience in person—is almost too overwhelming to understand.”
That gala also proved to be prophetic for Brownlee, who sang “A te, o cara” from I Puritani: he’ll be Arturo opposite Lisette Oropesa as Elvira in Bellini’s final opera when the Met premieres its first new production of I Puritani since the 1970s on New Year’s Eve.
Sometime after the gala, the tenor reached out to Morley about the possibility of doing a duets CD together. “Erin is a dear friend,” he told Observer, “and I have immense respect for her as an artist. She inspires me as a performer and continually pushes me to want to raise my own level.” Morley offered that “making an album together felt a little bit like planning a wedding. We have to make so many little decisions together!” Both said that the delightful Fille duet between Marie and Tonio was the first selection they chose to include.
Before they came together to record the CD in July 2024, Morley and Brownlee starred as Pamina and Tamino in the Spring 2023 Met premiere of Simon McBurney’s wildly inventive Die Zauberflöte. They were not the original casting: the production was planned with different singers for the canceled 2020-21 season. But their acclaimed high-flying collaboration perhaps signaled that they were a pair the Met needed to feature again. Morley shared that the “Zauberflöte experience was extremely cool. I’ve no doubt we’ll have a blast singing Fille together as well.”
Their individual long associations with the Met began within a season of each other as Brownlee debuted in April 2007 as Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, while Morley, fresh out of Juilliard, joined the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and performed a tiny role in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in February 2007. While the tenor continued in starring roles, Morley moved steadily up the ranks until two 2013 breakthrough appearances, first as Soeur Constance in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites and then, replacing the originally scheduled soprano, as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. These, along with Olympia in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, are among her most significant Met roles.
The upcoming Met Fille will be a role debut for Morley. An orphan raised by an all-male military platoon, Marie inevitably displays a tomboyishness that comes naturally to the soprano: “I love everything about Marie. I connect with her through and through. At one point in my childhood, all my friends were boys, and we played basketball for hours every day. At another point, I wanted to be in the army like my Dad had been… I just had a real desire to be a tough girl.”
On the other hand, Brownlee is a veteran of at least fifteen different productions as Tonio, Marie’s non-military suitor, a role he last performed at the Met in 2011 in Laurent Pelly’s beloved comically antic production, which has also been seen at Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra, La Scala, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. It’s likely that even those who may have never seen the opera will know Tonio’s big first-act aria with its nine high Cs! “I have performed this role many times, and I still feel a rush when I arrive at the high Cs! It’s important to stay settled and focused on producing my best, most efficient singing in this moment. I respect the challenges and embrace the pyrotechnics.”
But Tonio isn’t all about this show-stopping bravura, as “the second act aria is completely different and all about producing a compelling, heart-touching plea in the fight for his love. I often feel a greater sense of satisfaction in being able to execute the second aria than the first!”
While their new duet CD, The Golden Age, wasn’t explicitly planned to coincide with the Fille revival, its release was eventually coordinated with the Met opening. Before it was recorded, Brownlee had a notable success with another collaborative CD—Amici e rivali, an all-Rossini program with fellow tenor Michael Spyres. “I was pleased with the success of Amici e rivali, and it highlighted the collegiality and friendship or connection that can spill over to the stage. I thought, ‘why not do it again?’—thus the project The Golden Age was born!”
Both artists emphasized that the mid-19th-century Italian and French repertoire included in the new CD with Ivan Repušić conducting the Münchner Rundfunkorchester was chosen to emphasize the most moving and exciting aspects of the operatic voice by highlighting “pieces a little off the beaten path that showcased virtuosic writing that challenged us as singers and communicators.” It seems a sentiment much in line with the Met’s past campaign “The Voice Must be Heard” which the company has brought back this season.
Morley includes lovely versions of “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto and The Bell Song from Delibes’s Lakmé, two of the most often-recorded coloratura chestnuts, while Brownlee explores a virtually unknown extended scena from Donizetti’s Marino Faliero. But the duets are the CD’s real gems, including two Donizetti items, the Fille number and the heavenly “Tornami a dir” from Don Pasquale that many listeners will already know.
“Revelatory” must be the best descriptor for two French duets: “D’ou viens-tu?…C’est le Dieu de la jeunesse,” another slice of Lakmé, and “Ils verront si je mens!” from Bizet’s rarely performed La Jolie Fille de Perth. The latter aptly demonstrates, along with Brownlee’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles aria, that there is so much more to Bizet than Carmen. Both Lakmé excerpts urgently argue for more revivals of a work labeled by many today as untouchable due to the stereotypical treatment of its Hindu characters. Morley, however, argues that the work is far harsher on the British colonists and might profitably be seen as illuminating the destructive effect of the exploitative Raj.
My own favorite track from the CD is “Ah, quel respect…Ce téméraire qui croit nous plaire,” a delicious Rossini gem from Le Comte Ory. This sizzling duel between Adèle and Ory is a French retread swiped from the composer’s Il viaggio a Reims, recently revived by Opera Philadelphia. This track demonstrates that an ideal Met follow-up to Fille would be a revival of Bartlett Sher’s Le Comte Ory production starring Morley and Brownlee!
The Met’s Fille will be conducted by Giacomo Sangripanti, who was so impressive in his Met debut last season, and also feature Susan Graham, Peter Kálmán and actress Sandra Oh as the Duchess of Krakenthorp, a non-singing cameo role that opera companies have cast with Bea Arthur, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. After its run, Morley will add a new Richard Strauss role to her repertoire when she takes on Zdenka in Arabella at the Zurich Opera. She will return to the Met in 2027-28 for a new work, The Mothers of Kherson by Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets with a libretto by American playwright George Brant. Brownlee, who jumped in to replace an ailing colleague for the second performance of the Met’s new La Sonnambula, has remained one of the world’s go-to bel canto tenors for two decades. But he will reveal his first-ever Duke in Verdi’s Rigoletto during February in Tokyo, where last spring he said goodbye to Barbiere’s Almaviva, long a signature role. “Now I’ll yield to the young guys!” Throughout the season, the pair will reunite to present The Golden Age concerts, most often with piano, as when Malcolm Martineau accompanies them at New York City’s 92nd Street Y on May 6. When asked which role in the other’s repertoire they wish they could try out, Brownlee said, “Absolutely the Doll in Tales of Hoffmann,” while Morley said she “would steal Tonio from him for a night! Who wouldn’t love to sing “Ah, mes amis”?”
