Word: otello
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...recording of Verdi's Otello on London Records uses this formula neatly. The music is one of the best-known operas by one of the best-known composers of opera, the names are big (Pavarotti, Kiri te Kanawa and Leo Nucci, with Sir Georg Solti at the helm), and the pretext is a double celebration: the 100th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the 100th recording on CD of Solti with the CSO. But, unlike the "Three Tenors" concert or the Amadeus soundtrack, a new recording of Otello is the kind of project that must stand...
Soprano Mirella Freni, 56, will not sing Madama Butterfly onstage. The part is so heavily emotional that she feels it could upset the vocal balance she has spent a lifetime achieving. Luciano Pavarotti has just won acclaim for his first Otello, and most musical experts think he was right to wait until age 55 to try the heroic role. The list of parts that tenor Alfredo Kraus, 63, will not touch reads almost like a chart of opera's greatest hits, including Cavaradossi in Tosca and Rodolfo in La Boheme. Kraus sticks strictly to lighter parts that do not strain...
...their elders, many of today's young singers are in too much of a rush. Leonie Rysanek, 64 and still a shimmering soprano, says, "The first word to learn is no, if you want a career." Says Pavarotti: "Go easy. One new role a year is plenty." Before his Otello, sung in a concert version with the Chicago Symphony, music fans speculated that he lacked the declamatory heft for the part. But Pavarotti not only had it; he was able to sing three out of four performances with a bad cough...
...OTELLO...
...bother to film Verdi's Otello if you are going to omit its most famous aria, the haunting Willow Song, thus reducing Desdemona to a walk-on? Director Franco Zeffirelli never quite answers that question. The flamboyant Italian's 1983 cinematic version of La Traviata widened the opera's scope with tender reminiscences only implied in the libretto. In Otello, however, flashbacks to the Moor's slave childhood are maudlin, and Zeffirelli's camera, jumping edgily from storm to massed choruses to brawls and bedrooms, tires the mind. As Otello, Tenor Placido Domingo is in robust voice, and Bass Justino...