Gaetano Donizetti's comedy, with serious underpinnings, "La Fille du Régiment" (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1840), enjoyed a sparkling Metropolitan Opera revival this month, in Laurent Pelly's imaginative production, introduced here two seasons ago. There were newcomers to the cast, including one making an unusual cameo appearance, and some returning to important assignments. I caught the last of the season's six hearings, on February 22.

Brash and ebullient as Donizetti's titular tomboy, Diana Damrau, the new Marie, wielded a steam iron as expertly as she did a rifle, and folded mountains of soldierly long johns as crisply as she dispatched ornate florid figures in her beloved regimental songs. Damrau appropriately imbued Marie's elegiac cavatinas, "Il faut partir," the tearful farewell to her military family, and "Par le rang et par l'opulence," expressing despair concerning the trappings of nobility, in which she feels so out of her depth, with as full a measure of pathos as one would bring to arias in Donizetti's tragedies. Reunited with the regiment, she followed the latter with an ecstatic "Salut à la France," in sharp contrast with the anger and frustration she packed into delicate lines of the aria antica that she was forced to sing in her music lesson scene.

The first time we saw Damrau's Marie and Juan Diego Flórez's Tonio together, it was clear that they were thoroughly smitten with each other as, initially tongue-tied in each other's presence, they allowed dramatically apt, bashful phrases to abut very focused delivery. The duet, "Depuis l'instant où, dans mes bras ... De cet aveu si tendre ...Longtemps coquette," in which they examined and tested their love, was sheer delight.

Flórez brought down the house once again, as he did in 2008, not only with his triumphant "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" full of ringing high B-flats, and "Pour mon âme," with eight written and one interpolated, effortless high Cs, as he joined the 21st regiment expressly to marry Marie, but also with his smooth legato "Pour me rapprocher de Marie," his plea for her hand, which he capped with an added high C-sharp. Also acclaimed was his entrance, riding a tank up to the château, to rescue his love from an unwanted match with the Duc de Krakenthorp.

This seems as good a time as any to mention Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's return to the Met, after a dozen years' absence, playing the Duchesse de Krakenthorp, the young Duke's aunt here, a spoken role which she turned into a singing role, first by treating the prelude to Act Two as a vocalise, sometimes sung double time, in defiance of Maestro Marco Armiliato, and then by interpolating Alberto Ginastera's "Canción al árbol del olvido," a torrid tango, as an entrance aria. She acknowledged her New Zealand roots by addressing Hortensius (Donald Maxwell) as "Matey" and concluded her appearance with a horrified high scream, as she realized Marie would wed Tonio in lieu of her nephew.

Meredith Arwady, and not the variously announced Felicity Palmer and Ann Murray-the operatic one, not the pop one-was the new and oh-so-grand Marquise de Berkenfield, and having a singer in her prime, rather than one near the end of her career, in the role was a welcome novelty. Accepting the villagers' tribute as her due, until she abashedly realized that it was, rather, a prayer addressed to Mary, she embellished her aria, "Pour une femme de mon nom," with high notes, low notes, and descents deep and deeper into her earth mother chest register. She, too, treated us to an interpolation, a bit of Dalila's "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix," assisted at the piano by Maurizio Muraro's sturdy Sergeant Sulpice, Marie's parent and now the Marquise's ally, to distract Hortensius' attention from their intimate conversation about Marie's origins.

Jeffrey Mosher, Roger Andrews, and Jack Wetherall took the other solo roles.