Piotr Beczała has built up such good will amid potentially troublesome Metropolitan Opera productions – from the Las Vegas Rigoletto to Tchaikovsky’s theatrically static Iolanta – that one wants to muster more affection for these performances than the disc allows. The overall package is extremely attractive, with the well-recorded Opéra National de Lyon orchestra under the highly poetic direction of Alain Altinoglu, and features repertoire that includes old favorites such as the Flower Song from Carmen and the excerpt from Donizetti’s less-known Dom Sebastien. Though his voice is Italianate in its tone, Beczała reportedly studied recordings by great French tenors of the past, and isn’t afraid to take high notes in a tasteful, well-calculated mixture of head and chest voice.

However, when Diana Damrau arrives near the end of the disc for the Saint Sulpice scene from Manon, one hears what has been missing from Beczała. After only a few arias, one notices that he’s making pretty much the same vocal moves in aria after aria, even though their idioms range from the aforementioned Carmen to Boieldieu’s’ lighter-weight La dame blanche. His vibrato spreads slightly under pressure – which becomes a mild annoyance.

Any such minuses would be far less notable were Beczała more attuned to dramatic content. He seems so bent on singing in good clear French that he neglects using the language as a vehicle for varied emotion. Of course, the characters behind the arias tend to be theatrical types without great dimension. But Damrau’s expressive shaping of even some of the less prominent moments of her Manon scene show not only what can be done but what needs to be done in this music, particularly on a disc whose arias inhabit such similar emotional moments in their respective plots. Also, Beczała seems not to have a fully developed relationship with the microphone – which he tends to sing at rather than with.