Yannick Nezet-Seguin knows how to conduct an entrance.
The Metropolitan Opera's music director designate did just that when first appearing as a guest conductor in a new production of Carmen in 2009: The ever-familiar prelude felt like a racehorse coming out of the gate, not thoughtful or smart, but seizing your attention in ways that haven't happened often enough at the Met. Tuesday's opening of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman similarly plunged your ears immediately into the raw Nordic seacoast setting and the cursed nomadic ship searching for redemption.
Now that Nezet-Seguin is becoming a New York fixture — and was pelted with roses from the orchestra pit during Tuesday's curtain call — the question that has to be asked is how much true substance lies behind such flourishes. The visceral element is not nearly enough for Dutchman. This is the first opera in which Wagner found his voice and charted a harmonic course that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Any good conductor would conjure atmospheric orchestral force. But in passages where young Wagner wasn't quite saying what he meant, Nezet-Seguin's combination of inspiration and strategy took the music the rest of the way.
Orchestral writing that seems to be there to get to the next set piece suddenly told you something about the characters or accentuated a plot point. Vocal lines that can seem to meander had heightened contour and said something emphatic — with the considerable input of Michael Volle singing the title role with the detail of an art-song recitalist but a baritonal quality that gave his voice extra Wagnerian charisma. That added dimension heightened the contrast between the Dutchman's profound existential weariness — he's a man who isn't allowed to die — and the bourgeois shallowness of the villagers around him that he must court in order to achieve salvation.
Yet Nezet-Seguin telegraphed how the villagers are in their own genteel prison. The rhythmic precision he brought to the breezy, lyrical "Spinning Chorus" telegraphed how much these characters are kept in their place — one that the Dutchman-obsessed heroine Senta defies with music that sounds a world away from that of her peers, and feels, at times, unhinged. Some listeners say the "Sailor's Chorus" later in the opera could be mistaken for Gilbert & Sullivan. Not Tuesday. As light-hearted as the music is on the surface, Nezet-Seguin's tempos were deliberate in a clean way, again reminding you of this world's orderly society. The production used an earlier version of Wagner's score with orchestral interludes where there might normally be an intermissions. Nezet-Seguin exploited them for their potential commentary on the story but also treated them as orchestral showpieces perhaps to keep listeners from running for the restrooms.
The biggest ovation went to soprano Amber Wagner's Senta, which stood out but not for the right reasons. She has a Brunnhilde-sized voice that required tempos so slow that they bordered on tedious and overshadowed her colleagues during ensembles. It's such a tough role to cast that you're grateful to hear it sung so confidently. But she was mismatched with tenor AJ Glueckert (replacing Jay Hunter Morris) in the role of her suitor Erik, who sang with a clean unforced tone — perfect for such a middle-class character. As Daland, Franz-Josef Selig was in somewhat dry voice. But with the handsome 1989 August Everding production — full of clouds, snow and atmospheric scrims — revival is a strong one, not doubt prompting impatience among operagoers that Nezet-Seguin won't be the Met's full-time maestro until 2020.