In the opening of the Venetian act, Lindsey sang her part of the barcarolle coatless and hatless while buttoning up her vest, leaving little doubt of what had transpired between Nicklausse and Giulietta just before the big tune began. Dressed in a dark trouser suit and top hat, her hair worn in a lank pageboy and her face starkly pale, Lindsey's Nicklausse had a businesslike androgyny that suggested the young George Sand. Few singers can steal a scene without singing a note, but Lindsey's intense, silent presence in several key Hoffmann scenes was positively larcenous. Like all good athletes - she has been an avid soccer player from the age of five - Lindsey knows the value of well-considered stillness, as witness her fascinating Nicklausse in Bartlett Sher's 2009 staging of Les Contes d'Hoffmann at the Met. She seems to be incapable of timidity, at least when an opera orchestra is playing: in this past season's holiday revival of Hansel and Gretel at the Met, Lindsey's Hansel charged through the Witch's kitchen at ninety-five miles an hour, gobbling up space like the Tasmanian Devil and snapping into a dance of joy at the finale that was a half-beat away from a Zumba fitness routine. A born actress, Lindsey vividly captures the adolescent coltishness of Cherubino, the liquid grace of Wellgunde or the robust girlishness of Zerlina. Never was there a singer less likely to "park and bark" than the Virginia-born mezzo, who creates the physical life of a character with abandon.
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