She had a clear, if thin, soprano.

"My parents are dead, aren't they," she said in the same thin soprano I remembered from the theatre.

Saxon sang in a clear, true soprano, thin but sweet, and she was aware that she was singing to Billy.

Whenever she gets depressed, she says, she simply sings to herself, which Ms. Foote indeed does in a thin, lilting soprano that dissolves into air.

Some of the songs, or himines, were religious, and they were especially beautiful, the deep basses of the men mingling with the altos and thin sopranos of the women and forming a combination of sound that irresistibly reminded one of an organ.

It was the traditional farmboy cry, made thin and almost soprano in the thin air of Mars.

Kristen Plumley, as a Good-Fairy-style Amor, displayed an even thinner, almost acidulous soprano.

She spoke, and her voice was the voice I knew, even though it was rich contralto in place of the accustomed clear, thin soprano.

Miss Bolgan, an Italian making her Met debut, has a lithe, thin soprano that might work admirably in a theater of a thousand seats or so (the kind of place Bellini and his colleagues had mostly in mind when they wrote their operas).

Accompanied on the piano by Shelly Markham at Tuesday's opening night show, Ms. Marcovicci delivered them in her characteristically breathless style, alternating among speech song, a grainy low alto and a thin tremulous soprano.