>It is well over a decade now since Plácido Domingo controversially transitioned from tenor to baritone roles, a repertory he is still performing late in his career. He was 81 when this gala with American soprano Jennifer Rowley was filmed last year: one admires his stamina, determination and persistence in continuing, though his voice, inevitably perhaps, is but a shadow of what it once was.

The first baritone role I heard him sing was Verdi’s Boccanegra at the Proms in 2010, when I thought, frankly, he sounded like a low tenor rather than a genuine baritone, with an ease in his upper registers round high F and G where we would usually expect heft or pressure, and an occasional lack of fullness in his tone lower down, an impression reinforced when he sang Francesco in I due Foscari at Covent Garden four years later. On both occasions, however, his familiar bronzed tone remained intact, though here we notice that that too has faded. The sound is now at times dry, though his lower registers are in some ways stronger.

The programme is comparatively short, an aria apiece for Domingo and Rowley in each half followed by an extended Verdi duet, together with a certain amount of orchestral padding from the Opéra Royal Orchestra under Laurent Campellone. Domingo’s arias don’t always quite hit home as they might. ‘Nemico della patria’ from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier lacks power. Thomas’s Hamlet, urging us to drown our sorrows in wine, could do with a bit more bravado, though the central section, reflecting on our awareness of the precarious nature of our own mortality, is quietly touching. Despite the vocal inequalities, his dramatic artistry surfaces in the Verdi duets, where di Luna’s insistent, hectoring sexuality is finely captured, and he charts Germont père’s growing awareness of Violetta’s moral worth with characteristic subtlety: the look of shock on his face when he realises she is dangerously ill speaks volumes, for instance.

Rowley is very fine, revealing a big, rich, dramatic voice, more naturally suited, perhaps, to the Trovatore Leonora than to Violetta, though the long lines of ‘Dite alla giovine’ are beautifully sustained. Adriana Lecouvreur’s ‘Io son l’umile ancella’ is graciously done, and she really throws herself into Chimène’s ‘Pleurez, pleurez mes yeux’ from Massenet’s Le Cid with great intensity. There are three encores. Domingo sounds passionate and sad in an aria from Torroba’s zarzuela Maravilla, while Rowley gives us a flirtatious ‘Quando m’en vo’. They close with ‘Lippen schweigen’, waltzing together at one point to the audience’s delight. The orchestral items, meanwhile, are a bit of a mixed bag. Campellone drives the Forza del destino Overture excitingly hard, though Berlioz’s Carnaval romain is scrupulously detailed rather than exhilarating. The Fedora Intermezzo, though, sounds utterly gorgeous. Though at times touching, the whole thing is uneven at best, and, as with so much of Domingo’s recent work, sadly fades in comparison with memories of what once was.