Opera makes best of things in Marin

enough to remind a listener just how much we were missing.

Which is to say that you can admire, and be grateful for, the ingenuity and perseverance of everyone involved — and still bemoan the fact that any of it was necessary in the first place.

The program, deftly staged by director Jose Maria Condemi, included a few welcome nods to the plight in which we all found ourselves. With its two tiers of dressing rooms, the “Barber” set framed each of the participants handsomely (and looked more than ever like a Zoom chat set to highlight each “speaker” in turn). The “Barber” Overture made the perfect opener, and a moment in the spotlight for pianists Kseniia Polstiankina Barrad and Andrew King.

From then on, the program was a sequence of vocal numbers, connected by artful segues in which one excerpt bled into the next like the wipes in a video. Even mediated through the FM band of a car radio, it was clear that these singers knew what they were about.

For one listener, the evening’s most glorious moments featured the combination of two female voices. First came soprano Esther Tonea and mezzosoprano Simone McIntosh, joining forces for a luminous account of the duet “Che soave zeffiretto” from Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.” For a scene in which one character dictates a letter to another, the use of an iPhone to write and send an email felt like the perfect updating.

Soon afterward, McIntosh was joined by soprano AnneMarie MacIntosh for the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” whose crisp, perfectly tuned parallel melodies sent little thrills of delight into all the assembled automobiles.

There were other rewards as well, including tenor Zhengyi Bai’s vivid, swaggeringly charismatic rendition of Rossini’s “La Danza,” a tenderly shaped duet from Lehár’s “Merry Widow” by soprano Elisa Sunshine and baritone Timothy Murray, and bass Stefan Egestrom’s stylish “Some Enchanted Evening” from “South Pacific.”

What was notably missing, in addition to the sense of physical proximity to the artists, was the sound of applause. Each number dispersed into the air without that audible expression of acknowledgment and appreciation that turns out to be an integral part of every musical experience.

One day, in the not too distant future, all those wrongs will be righted. We’ll be in the same space as one another — artists and audiences alike — and we’ll be able to let them know directly how much they’ve illuminated our lives.