Another Great Review: Otello in Zurich	Otello   Susan Hall Zurich Opera House January 8, 2012   Verdi’s Otello is one of the greatest operas by one of the greatest composers and offers an opportunity for all the passion and beauty of the form to be put on display.  The current performance at the Opernhaus in Zurich gives Otello its due.  This is not Otello re-interpreted, but rather the original story as conceived by Verdi and Boito set in the contemporary world.  The story is for all time.  It does not feel bent out of shape in any way.  Otello’s central racial issue is immediately symbolized on a black curtain, which substitutes for the beautiful red velvet of the house.  A huge image of negro lips, which suggest erotic variation, echoes one of the racial epithets hurled at the Moor.  Otello is marked as an outsider and that makes him easy prey.  As the curtain opens, Venice hovers small in the background, double minarets enshrined on a church, which elevates up and out of sight as we focus on Cyprus in the foreground. The predator, Iago, is sung by Thomas Hampson, who has never sounded better.  In the Zurich Opera, Hampson is at home and delivers a riveting performance of the coldly calculating and ambitious officer who Otello has overlooked for the position of Lieutenant.  Hampson captures perfectly the notion that Iago is cold and has no real motive for his set up of Otello’s jealousy.  He dares to show this very evil side, the horror of Iago’s character. Hampson can also ham up ugly, humorous touches with aplomb.  His sina qua non baritone fits perfectly into the luxurious Verdi lines.  Barbara Frittoli’s easy sex appeal helps us understand why men in love with Desdemona, and how she can drive Otello around the bend.  After some initial fluttering, she settled into a lovely middle range.  While she strains at the top where her tone is untidy, the lower registers capture lush, velvet Verdi lines to perfection.  When Desdemona begs for Cassio’s restoration, she is noble.  She displays a heartrending devotion which Otello simply cannot recognize, blinded by his ferocious jealousy. Bad boys are Jose Cura’s specialty.  In the title role, he had a good night, extending himself to show not only Otello’s lack of confidence as an outsider, but also his manly desires and competence as a general.   He was at once raw and tender, seething inside as his tolerance for apparent infidelity evaporates.   Using dynamic range to capture both intimate moments and public ones where he is leader, Cura gave a detailed portrait of the man who never feels comfortable at the center of Venetian society.  He is a charismatic Otello.  Other cast members were uniformly excellent and included up and coming Stephan Pop as Cassio and Benjamin Bernheim as Rodrigo.  Massimo Zanetti stepped in at the last moment to conduct for Daniele Gatti.  He gave a brisk and beautiful performance of this exceptional score.  Like Cura, dynamic range was used to reveal the emotional story arc from moment to moment.   Inviting staging and set design fills the mind and eye, but does not distract from performance and story telling.  In this case, Graham Vick set the opera in the modern Middle East, bringing forward the seemingly eternal conflict between Muslims and the West.  A tank with cannon at the ready and a dilapidated car were dramatic symbols stage right.  Descending from the ceiling at appropriate times was a big billboard with warnings like ‘Attention.’   A huge statue of the ‘Lion of Venice’ descends as the Doge arrives.  A quarter moon slipped down center stage and was finally punctuated by a star.   Even when the stage was crowded it pleased.  The final scene was stripped bare, leaving a huge, barren black box.  Otello huddled into the wall, and Desdemona, in her heavily crinolined white wedding gown, both freeze during the orchestra’s final prelude.  Otello breaks into action first, turning in jealousy and guilt toward the woman he loves and must kill.   If you ever wonder if it is worth a trip to Zurich to see opera, the answer is a resounding yes.  The beauty of the house, its intimacy, and  stunning caliber of performance are particularly satisfying.   After the demise of live performance at the Metropolitan Opera which has fallen to the demands of HD broadcasts, all opera lovers will particularly appreciate Zurich productions.
Photos from Irmela

 

Otello in Bratislava

José Cura – Another Star at the National Theater Slovo Vladimír Blaho 14 February 2012 While concerts, which are organized by commercial companies in the square or in the building of SND (Ramón Vargas, Dmitri Hovoroskovky, Juan Diego Florez, Cecilia Bartoli), we have finally experienced a huge star in an opera.  Argentine tenor José Cura was introduced to Bratislava as Otello on 11 February 2012. […] José Cura is one of a group of Latin American tenors (Ramón Vargas, Marcello Alvarez, Juan Diego Florez, Rolando Villazón) who in the past decade have played “first fiddle” on the world’s opera stages.  The singer, whose family roots lead back to Lebanon, Spain, and Italy, is now nearly 50 and has for the last two decades been one of the jewels at the leading opera houses.  His unique personality, in addition to singing and conducting, and more recently, directing, and his artistic origins have gained him a certain (charismatic) reputation. In concert, he upturns the usual sleek production with both informal dress and behavior to attempt to make contact with the audience and meet them in song repertoire which features theatrical artistic expression. That approach is fully appropriate to opera performances, in which Cura focuses neither on the beauty of the voice nor on perfect technique but in the comprehensive understanding of complex characters interpreted through expressive voice, movement, facial expressions, and gestures.  With his dramatic, baritonal vocal characteristics and interpretative abilities, he is ideal for projecting the dramatic, verismo characters (Calaf in Puccini’s Turandot, Canio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci).  Apart from the heroic Samson in the French opera by Camille Saint-Säens, he is perhaps best known for his role in Verdi’s Otello, having appeared in about twenty different productions Cura offers a thrilling portrait of Verdi’s passionate hero at the SND, alternating between rage, despair, and resignation, his dramatic fund of striking force and with a metal ring in his top that must allow the same to be written as that by a Viennese critic about opera star Maria Jeritza, “that it (the voice) is amazing even when she sings with approximate intonation.” A speaksong interpretative style is also a [Cura] characteristic so recitative occasionally recall parlando (which would have strict vocal defenders of the Italian school distinguishing between verismo and the late Verdi and permitting it only in the first instance) and he occasionally deviates from the flow and tempo, changing the musical accents according to his own taste.  On the other hand, his performance is all perfectly thought out, calculated for maximum effect.  For example, when he first sees Desdemona he runs up the stairs like a young man, while at the beginning of the third act he climbs on wobbly (broken) knees. In evaluating Cura’s Otello, it is important to be aware of differences in interpretative approaches.  On one side stand the singers with beautiful voices, expert bel canto style and lovely legato, which makes listening a wonderful experience. Cura, on the other side, represents the stage creation, in which the visuals (either physical beauty or acting and expressive skills) play the more important part. After the deaths of the great Luciano Pavarotti and Alfredo Kraus, both of whom the broader public considered to be ‘technical’ vocalists, it appears that the scales have begun to lean toward the side of representational in the complexity of interpretation.  True, this approach has its limits [comments about Paris production of Madama Butterfly in which an otherwise good interpretative performance was marred by uninspired/average singing]…but Cura has not yet exceeded the threshold and therefore Bratislava opera lovers can enjoy even more of his art at his second appearance, in March, in Verdi’s Otello.

 

in Bratislava

José Cura – Lover, Predator, Murderer, Victim Pravda Paul Unger 13 February 2012  [excerpt] In recent years, a number of world famous artists have appeared live in Bratislava.  While Juan Diego Flórez, Ramón Vargas, Cecilia Bartoli and Dmitri Hvorostovsky performed in concerts brokered by private agencies and after the Lucrezia Borgia with Edita Gruberová and Paul Bršlíkom within the framework of the Bratislava Music Festival, the first truly stellar name has finally been brought to the opera theater.  The title role of Verdi’s Otello is played by one of its most popular performers, Argentine José Cura. At 49, José Cura stands at the zenith of his career, with fifteen years years and over two hundred performances of Otello behind him.  He knows at every moment what the hero experiences, what internal, often pathological, conflict sets him off, how to express quiet emotions of love, jealousy, impulsivity, mental collapse and failure. Cura is fixed on stage, the sea-and-storm hardened warrior, the tenderly loving husband who is also a predator, all the barrage of emotions that he must manage.  Cura’s concepts are extremely polished, both contrasting with and based on his deep knowledge of the original. It is particularly valuable that the actor’s expressive resources are subject to the musical and vocal lines of the situation.  Cura’s big, serious, almost baritone-tenor has a bronze polish and he has the experience to build the emotionally charged role without compromising in delicate areas—even at the price of a serious misunderstanding in pace between him and conductor Ondrej Lenárd.  Both have strong personalities so the search for the ‘middle way’ was challenging, especially in the first half.  Finally, however, some of the points were raised at a lively pace and slower sections were given content and inner reflection. It was a wonderful experience to watch as José Cura developed a dubious relationship with Iago (the expressive Dalibor Jenis) and as his feelings changed for Desdemona (Adriana Kohútková) as the predator becomes a lover, then getting caught in mental whirlpool as he becomes the victim of intrigue, murder, and death. The high expectations for José Cura were fulfilled.

Cura Crawled under the Skin of Otello SME Michaela Mojzisová 12 February 2012 [Excerpt]   On Saturday, the Slovak National Theater Opera presented Verdi’s Otello, starring on of the world’s most famous tenors, Argentinian José Cura  Although I do not doubt that his charisma and charm would have won over the audience at a José Cura concert, it was wonderful that he put on the costume of Otello and stood on the theater stage.  His effort provided the juice that the  Bratislava production previously lacked. The world-renowned tenor has performed as Otello approximately two hundred times.  To the SND he brought his own, mature concept of the controversial character.  His Otello is an aging man who, with a manly exterior and confident demeanor, hides old scars and internal uncertainty.  He is looking for redemption in the love of a young woman but instead Desdemona accidently becomes the instrument of his destruction. All this—and much more—can be read through Cura’s singing and acting.  He is emotional, not pathetic; he is dramatic but not hysterical.  Otello’s pain, his doubt, and his suffering are internalized and they are conveyed through Cura’s tone and gestures.  He keeps the viewer off-balance, impressing as he crawls under the skin [of the character].  The details are found in his vocal performance, details of which may be questioned in operatic terms but Cura would consider that to be nitpicking.  The singer with the dramatic, masculine, metallic voice did not hesitate to sacrifice the perfect aesthetic tone for a sense of authenticity in his character. Dalibor Jenis supported Cura in Saturday’s gala as an expressive, sophisticated Iago.  Adriana Kohútková’s Desdemona was convincing as in the last act.  Although harmony between conductor Ondreja Lenárd and the star creaked here and there, over time (the tempo) gained the momentum of a smooth performance.  The Bratislava audience survived the evening well, considering they must usually choose to travel beyond our country for such an experience.  The performance repeats 2 March.

 

New Review: Andrea Chénier DVD

Giordano, Umberto - Andrea Chénier Der Adel feiert, das Volk murrt Label/Verlag: Arthaus Musik VÖ: 01/2012 Klassik Midou Grossmann 15 April 2012 Five Stars Giordano's 'Andrea Chénier' is now available in a captivating recording from Bologna.  Absolutely a special treat in its scenic as well as its musical aspects, this live recording of Giordano's opera 'Andrea Chénier'! In 2006, Bologna's Teatro Comunale scored a hit in grand style. Directing and stage and costumes, all in the hands of Giancarlo del Monaco, were the basis for a perfectly thrilling and convincing production. Opulent and impressive the costumes, likewise the set design which succeeded masterfully in presenting each scene of this Revolution opera to best advantage (lighting: Wolfgang von Zoubek). The painting of revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was stabbed in his bathtub in 1793 by a female follower of the opposing party, is also a part of this scene.  Were the folks from Bregenz perhaps in Bologna? Did they perhaps bring this idea for the effective set on the lake with them?  Those matters which are the basis for musical moments of glory:  With regard to the singing, too, this performance is one of world-class caliber. José Cura presents himself as one of the best tenors at this time. He is indeed the excellent actor one expects him to be, with a sophisticated perception of his own body, which he brings into play convincingly. In his singing, each note seems deeply felt; the voice performs effortlessly with a warm, dark timbre all the way to the totally clear high notes. Cura's is the perfect balance between spirit and life. The big aria in the first act stands as an example of the art of singing at its best. He thrilled the audience in Bologna with his incredibly nuanced palette of (vocal) colors, a wealth of shadings as well as a large range of dynamics. Maria Guleghina is a great partner in the role of Maddalena di Coigny. With reference to her vocal performance, every note seems also completely natural. Without any effort at all, she fashions this difficult part so as to captivate with a wealth of facets. Her interplay with Cura makes the tragic final act an event. Even though this production lacks any obvious update, one can recognize a strong allusion to the current social situation. […] […]  One cannot but once again admire the artistic energy of Umberto Giordano. A leading team as homogenous as this one can apparently awaken the boldest of forces in each singer, and that is the basis for creating great magic moments. "Andrea Chénier" needs no more and no less in order to thrill as a masterpiece, which it had already done in its premiere performance of 1896 at Milan's La Scala.