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Opera review: Otello at Royal Opera House


He was widely admired as the grand old man of Italian opera but had not produced a new work since Aida some 15 years earlier. Yet Otello features some of his most powerful music, bursting with impressive originality and energy. With a very strong cast and Antonio Pappano conducting, Covent Garden does glorious justice to this fine work.

The plot is, of course, based on Shakespeare’s play of the same title (give or take an H in the Moorish general’s name). Otello is betrayed by the evil Iago, whom he thought his friend but who is after his job and power. Iago spreads false rumours about Otello’s much-loved wife Desdemona, succeeding to such an extent that Otello murders her then kills himself when he realises the truth.

The story in the opera, of course, is far more condensed and less intricate than the play, but that is not necessarily a disadvantage. In fact the pace and intensity of the plot is almost an improvement, and the drama of the music more than compensates for anything lost from the play, especially when the singers are also such fine actors as we saw at Covent Garden.

The title role is taken by American tenor Gregory Kunde, who is a singer whose huge voice and stage presence can dominate a production and would have done so had he not be matched for power by the seething villainry of Spanish baritone Carlos Alvarez as Iago. When either of these was on stage, they dominated the audience’s attention and when both were together the atmosphere was electric.

All we now needed to complete the trio of main roles was a glorious Desdemona and the Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho filled that role perfectly. Quite apart from her superb and delicate voice, Jaho is always convincing as a doomed heroine and I know of no soprano who can be relied upon to die with such grace and pathos. Verdi gives Desdemona a particularly effective aria as she bravely goes to her fate knowing that Othello is going to murder her and the audience showed their stunned appreciation of Jaho’s performance by hearing it in pin-dropping silence. They even held back their usual coughing. When that occurs, you know that something special is happening.

With Pappanio coaxing impressive energy from the orchestra, the singers were lifted to even greater heights to match it, making the whole evening a great musical experience. My only slight reservation was with the production itself with both Keith Warner’s direction and the general appearance of the set designs failing to match the glory of the music and singing. The complexity of some of the design did not match the starkness of the story, and on several occasions the entrances of the leading characters were curiously mute compared with the impact they made on the plot. With a weaker cast, this production might work, but it all seemed a bit of a mismatch with the talents of Kunde, Alvarez, Jaho and Pappano.

Box Office: 020 7304 4000 or roh.org.uk (various dates and times until December 22)



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