NEW YORK - The Met finally got one right. And it was a tough one. It takes a bunch of really good singers to bring off Verdi's 'Don Carlo,' with voices loud enough to drown out the drone of us opera-lovers mourning the decline of Verdi- singing in the modern age. Admittedly, not all of the singers at the 'Don Carlo' premiere on Monday night were actually able to change our minds. But there was enough solid singing, and Nicholas Hytner's production -- his first at the Met -- was good enough to make a satisfying evening of opera. Or maybe I just love 'Don Carlo' so much that I'm willing to be optimistic about the proverbial half- full glass. Hytner adopted what I suspect is becoming a formula for European directors approaching the Metropolitan Opera: the 'put them in traditional costumes and create slightly stylized sets' plan of attack. (Luc Bondy is still fine-tuning that one.) The sets, by Bob Crowley (also in a Met debut), ranged from servicable to evocative, starting with stylized white trees in the snowscape of Fontainebleau (where the opera's five-act version opens) and extending to a dark space shot through with shafts of smoky light, the vault of the monastery of St. Just, dramatically awe-full. A forbidding wall pierced with small square windows descended between scenes, repeatedly shutting Carlo out of the spaces where the action played. Some of the stylization was a little trite (the female chorus sported big fur cuffs in the Fontainebleau scene, bright red fans in the red- and-black garden scene), and King Philip's cavernous study seemed like a half- finished idea, but the general idiom of big dark spaces, large columns, military severity was effective. The real reason it worked, though, was Hytner's attention to the characters. It's always hard to know how much inspiration comes from a director and how much from the singer: Ferruccio Furlanetto, who has become one of the great portrayers of King Philip and whose 'Ella giammai m'amo' monologue at the opening of Act IV was stunning, had some of the same tender, telling touches on Monday that he showed in live broadcast of La Scala's opening night in 2008. After accusing his wife, Elisabetta, of adultery, he grabs her fainted body and cradles her head, pouring out all the affection he can't figure out how to give her when she's conscious. But Hytner certainly had a hand in it. And his conception of Elisabetta was one of the best things in the opera. The future Queen burst onto the scene at the very start of the opera, a strong-willed, loose-haired tomboy princess with a hunting rifle, beautiful and proud and free. She met Carlo, fell wildly in love, and then learned she had been betrothed to his father; you could see the walls of duty closing in around her as for the first time in her life she couldn't do exactly what she wanted. Marina Poplavskaya embodied this free spirit, and her subsequent proud sad life at the Spanish court, so convincingly, and sang with such a lovely tone -- round and supple and warm -- that you could sometimes overlook the fact that the part was clearly two sizes too big for her. She couldn't fake this in the big passages, though she tried to temper her delivery of the big final aria, 'Tu che le vanita,' with artistry and sophisticated pianos. I hate to keep harping on a theme in my writing about the Met, but the company here yet again has chosen a voice that's too small for the role, but that I predict will sound great in the HD broadcast (scheduled for December 11). Vocally, the evening was sustained by Furlanetto and Roberto Alagna, who as Don Carlo sounded ragged in his opening aria but quickly sang his way into a firmer, ringing delivery -- a little tinny at times, and a little rough at others, but overall thoroughly respectable. Simon Keenlyside's Posa was more a work in progress. Here's another singer who doesn't quite have the vocal heft for the role, though he came to it with both beauty and artistry. (Posa's love for Carlo in this production extended beyond mere battlefield camaraderie.) Keenlyside overcompensated for vocal lightness with a kind of physical restlessness that's become widespread among many of the Met's so-called 'singing actors.' There's been a lot of criticism of the old-school approach of 'park and bark' around the Met in the last few years, but the ability to keep still on stage conveys a kind of authority and strength that lots of gestures seldom achieve -- as Furlanetto's King Philip abundantly demonstrated in his magisterial Act II duet with Keenlyside's shifting Posa. 