Here is my Friday April 8 suntimes.com and Saturday April 9 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday April 7, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performance of Verdi's Otello with music director Riccardo Muti and vocal soloists.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti leads the CSO and vocal soloists (left to right) soprano Krassimira Stoyanova (Desdemona), tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko (Otello), baritone Carlo Guelfi (Iago), and tenor Juan Francisco Gatell (Cassio) at Orchestra Hall. - CSO/©Todd Rosenberg Photography
Muti, CSO triumph in Verdi’s ‘Otello’
Wholly involving concert opera at every moment
By ANDREW PATNER
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday and Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Friday April 15 at New York's Carnegie Hall.
This is what it’s all been about. Why newspapers around the world have been following Italian conductor Riccardo Muti’s recent health problems, his actions and statements to defend the cultural life of his native country, and his plans as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as if he were on the level of a major sports star.
Because he is. Only more so. Because as music director he’s the player-manager par excellence. He’s the playmaker and the historian and the coach at each base. He even picks the venues and the visiting teams and starters.
I’d seen and heard two of Muti’s staged performances of Verdi’s Otello in Salzburg in the summer of 2008 so I knew the excitement that he generates with this score, which he knows with a scholar’s care and a lover’s eyes. From that full production and other of Muti's offerings in Salzburg and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York I knew some of the strengths and limits of his preferred pool of singers. But to have this work performed here Thursday night before a packed Orchestra Hall wanting to see what sort of a comeback Muti, 69, would make after two sudden illnesses, and to see and hear the CSO and Chorus wanting to give everything with this work, this conductor, this hall, and this audience, was enough to supply goosebumps even to the most seasoned concertgoers. The roar of the crowd when Muti took the stage after the vocal soloists were in their places was out of another time.
Verdi’s 1884-86 operatic setting, with librettist Arrigo Boito, of the Shakespeare tragedy of the jealous and manipulated Moorish general opens with its own roar: its famous orchestral and choral storm scene, still potentially one of the most thrilling moments in music. No one, not even Sir Georg Solti, whose last Chicago performances were of this same work in concert 20 years ago (with Luciano Pavarotti, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Leo Nucci), gets the “charge” of this scene better than Muti. Even more important, Muti keeps the tension of that charge -- and its appropriate changes and alterations -- for the 2½ hours of nearly continuous music, a uniquely propulsive four-act work crafted by a composer already in his 70s. Muti offers not a moment of manipulation or added effect. Story and music are wed, the opera is the drama.
Many a star has performed in this work, Verdi’s penultimate opera, and the last, Muti likes to remind us, written intentionally for the public. Whether Muti shuns such singers because he does not want them to distract from the attention to the score and performance as a whole or whether he seeks to train a new generation of singers, or both, I couldn’t say. At times in the first two acts some of his casting choices had you scratching your head. (The Iago, Italian baritone Carlo Guelfi, was a late substitute for the announced Muti protégé Nicola Alaimo.) But after the second intermission, the singers both warmed into their roles and reached connections dramatic and vocal in the third and fourth acts -- performed without pause -- that made the whole, somewhat motley ensemble spellbinding.
Young Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko best exemplified this transformation, wholly convincing in his madness and desperation when he has persuaded himself that Desdemona has betrayed him. The prophetic nature of the soffocata passages of his Act 3 soliloquy were pin-drop material. Some say this opera should be called Iago, for the poisonous villain who drives the action. But in Act 4, it is Desdemona’s work, and Bulgarian soprano Krassimira Stoyanova astonished in the Willow Song and Ave Maria. Although Guelfi did not impress in the famous Act 2 Credo, he, too, came into his own as the threads of plot and vocal line increased. And it certainly appeared that he was actually crying during Stoyanova’s final scenes.
Argentinean tenor Juan Francisco Gatell was a bright and believable Cassio. Italian mezzo Barbara Di Castri, with hand on breast, added some moments of stage presence as Emilia. American bass-baritone Eric Owens, fresh from the title role of Handel’s Hercules at Lyric Opera of Chicago, lent gravitas and provided a real base for the ensembles as the Venetian ambassador, Lodovico. Michael Spyres, Paolo Battaglia, and David Govertsen rounded out the parts effectively.
The 175-strong chorus, prepared by Duain Wolfe and Muti, offered oceans of sound with superb supplemental work from some 30 members of the Chicago Children’s Choir, directed by Josephine Lee.
But the orchestra -- and Verdi and Muti’s enormous attention to its multiple roles in this masterwork -- told the story. For decades, literally, Muti and University of Chicago musicologist Philip Gossett have argued that Verdi is a composer at the level of any other heard in the (largely Germanic) concert hall tradition. Muti’s use here of the rarely performed slimmed down Act 3 finale that Verdi fashioned for Paris in 1894, the last operatic music he ever wrote, is in line with this. From strings playing as one, to 'cello ensembles, the viola choir, brass attacks (never too loud), bassoon and harp lines becoming individual characters, and Scott Hostetler’s magic English horn (the only solo bow granted by Muti on Thursday) with Desdemona’s solo scene, the case was made. Home run. Grand slam. Touchdown. Viva Muti. Viva Verdi.
There are two remaining Chicago performances of this Otello and one, on April 15, in New York. Don’t miss it.
Comments