In “La Serva Padrona,” Pergolesi’s 1733 comedy about social mobility and female resourcefulness, a maid exerts her formidable will to get the master to marry her. There’s some potent emotional chicanery involved in her successful ploy to rescue Santayana (no spoilers here), but in truth the contest is won by Savitri’s vocal exertions, with their combination of intimate specificity and Wagnerian sweep. In the title role, soprano Kelsea Webb gave a gorgeous performance, marked by magnificent urgency and tenderness, and she was well matched by bass-baritone David Weigel — bold and imposing in the oracular phrases Holst wrote for Death — and the sweet-toned tenor Addison Marlor in the too-small role of Satyavan. Kazaras brought the point home tellingly by casting Satyavan as a soldier in the trenches, Savitri as an anxious wife back home in England, and Death as a grisly figure from the Front, clad in army uniform and gas mask. “La Serva Padrona,” by contrast, is all laughs, and the duo of soprano Jana McIntyre and bass-baritone Daniel Noyola conveyed the piece’s charms seamlessly. Noyola returned at evening’s end to play a servant in “The Bear,” but the relevant action there is between a headstrong Russian widow and the ferocious neighboring landowner who arrives to collect on a debt and ends up falling in love. Walton’s score is a manic, ingratiating hybrid of strains from Italian opera, Gilbert and Sullivan and some delicately insinuated modernism, all meant to tell a yarn that would collapse like a souffle without the necessary ironic energy.

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