The Samoan tenor Pene Pati’s effect on audiences resembles that of the late Luciano Pavarotti, and no wonder. The liquid-gold timbre, the thousand-watt smile, the focused sincerity that leaves no daylight between his own personality and that of the character he plays—this is a package few listeners can resist. Such assets put Pati at an incalculable advantage in Massenet’s adaptation of Goethe’s semiautobiographical pan-European best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther, who has ravishing music to sing but a clingy, self-sabotaging streak that can strain a listener’s patience past the breaking point. Werther’s love interest Charlotte, a bird of much the same feather, presents similar challenges that the winning French mezzo Marianna Crebassa may be expected to surmount with equal aplomb. We’re trusting the excellent French conductor Raphaël Pichon to draw out the gloomy romanticism of Massenet’s score with his customary sensitivity. The director is Ted Huffman, an American and a MacArthur fellow also noted for his sensitivity—less to the art of other ages than to political, societal, and personal dysphorias of the present day. —Matthew Gurewitsch