Falstaff, the scintillating comic coda to Verdi’s gallery of towering tragedies, demands of its rapscallion hero the vocal qualities of the composer’s great baritone protagonists and antagonists, plus a Mozartian slyness and quickness of thought. Quinn Kelsey, the Met’s reigning Rigoletto, made a precocious debut in the part at Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival in 2014. In the interim, he has taken on the arguably more age-appropriate assignment of Ford, a jealous husband whose paranoia erupts in a monologue that is a showstopper in its own right. This summer, in Santa Fe, Kelsey returns to the top of the cast list with the benefit of extra seasoning. —Matthew Gurewitsch