There’s juicy melodrama galore for the entire cast of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. But the opera stands or falls by the tenor in the heavily romanticized title role of a rhapsodic French Revolutionary poet in the shadow of the guillotine. Jonas Kaufmann, cheered as Chénier at Covent Garden and the Vienna Staatsoper, should have audiences at these concert performances in the palm of his hand. The ardent Eva-Maria Westbroek sings Maddalena, the disaster-prone airhead who in adversity claws her way to tragic grandeur. You may remember her grand epiphany as sung by Maria Callas to running commentary by Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. —M.G.