Otello is the most simple of Verdi’s operas, from a narrative point of view, and in the motivations of its characters, while being the most sophisticated musically, Falstaff as always excepted. Its three chief characters — and Verdi is less interested in any of the subordinate ones than usual — are almost caricatures in their single-mindedness, and Desdemona at least could be thought subnormal, she is so incapable of grasping that her husband would prefer her not to mention Cassio’s name. Iago is famously endowed with a reason for his malignancy, in the form of a demonic world-view expressed in the Credo — though in Act I he has already said that he hates the Moor because he has been overlooked for promotion. Otello is the ‘noble hero’ who wouldn’t presume to question anyone’s word, except Desdemona’s. In the opera, more than in Shakespeare, he falls for Iago’s plot with almost ridiculous alacrity. Yet the musical portrayal of these three and of their interactions is so succinct and so memorable that usually the opera presents no difficulties of acceptance, and you emerge wrung out by the force of expression and the appalled realisation of how prone human beings are to destroy what they most care about, of how ‘love’ is often a near-synonym for suspicious rapacity.
Peter Hall is the producer whom one most trusts, has done for many years, to present great drama, spoken or sung, in a way that ensures its most direct impact; the least impertinent of producers, in fact. Yet with this Otello, less now even than when it was first presented four years ago, he has succeeded only partially. I think it makes little difference that he updates it to the 19th century, though that certainly adds nothing and possibly subtracts even further from the overall plausibility. He has failed here to persuade the performers to be much more than figures in a costume drama, and David Rendall in particular merely lumbers around, seeming from the start nothing but a wounded animal. When the musical creation of a character is so economical, every utterance must count, but neither his ‘Esultate!’ nor his subsequent music in Act I went nearly far enough towards defining Otello. He grew in dignity for the Act III monologue and the finale, but the part demands more than he now has the capacity to give.
The Russian Tatiana Monogarova is beautiful both to see and hear, but she sang in what I take to be some kind of operatic Esperanto, and Desdemona’s pleadings, whether for Cassio or for herself, do enormously depend on precise enunciation. ‘The Willow Song’ and ‘Ave Maria’ were long processions of slow and lovely noises, but there’s a question about their time-scale anyway, and when they are so protracted the question of their contribution to the drama takes on a disagreeable urgency. Anthony Michaels-Moore mainly underplayed Iago, but it sounded as if that was as much the result of vocal limitations as of a plausible reading of the role. Meanwhile Vladimir Jurowski conducted with finesse and ferocity, though sometimes alternating too abruptly between the two. The evening had its excitements but they weren’t cumulative, though that could have changed by now.
The Kirov Opera began its brief visit to London with a potent Boris Godunov, in Mussorgsky’s first version, which is to say in seven scenes, no Polish act, and a quite startlingly different approach to the setting of words, and to the emphases in the drama, from later versions, and especially from Rimsky-Korsakov’s (it’s time that was revived as an independent work). It was everything an evening at the opera should be, at least negatively: no intervals, no gaps between scenes, no applause till the end, no stars; and positively in the commitment to the work, both in the fanatically intense playing under Valery Gergiev and in the elimination of inessentials on stage. Place was suggested by objects lowered from the flies, mainly onion-shaped domes, and by striking costumes: Boris moved in a kind of cage, both grand and restrictive. The whole approach to staging is utterly at odds with what we have come to expect, in my case to dread, from Russia — for that we had to wait for Khovanshchina.
Thanks to a succession of supreme singing actors, beginning with Shalyapin and perhaps concluding with Nicolai Ghiaurov, Boris Godunov hasn’t been able to resist being seen as a vehicle for its central figure, whether presented broadly sympathetically or not. This first version gives Boris far fewer opportunities to expand, and Vladimir Vaneev consequently was bound to come across as a second-rater. Yet he well fulfilled the demands of the part, and so far as ‘integrated’ is a word that one can in any way apply to Mussorgsky’s operas, he was integrated into this one. But the performance was of a kind to make the singling out of individual artists irrelevant. Dramatic focus was everything, concentration on a series of tableaux which presented material for contemplation rather than for identification or the following of a narrative, which in any case is virtually non-existent. The opera’s harsh originality was revealed in all its boldness, not by any means attractive but, in its unique way, overwhelming.
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