Word: otello
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Domingo opens season in a blazing TV performance of Otello...
...real show was inside, however, and what a show it was. Audience and TV viewers alike were treated to a full-scale display of all the elements that can make opera truly grand: a masterpiece of the repertory-Verdi's Otello-opulent staging, brilliant conducting by Met Music Director James Levine, and a cast of top singers giving a blazing performance...
Tenor Placido Domingo was masterly in his first Otello in New York (he has performed it 40 times elsewhere and recorded it for RCA). Dramatically, he projected a strong warrior but a vulnerable man, a noble nature whose obliviousness to evil turned all his strengths-his depth of feeling, his decisiveness, his simplicity-to fatal weaknesses. The cruelly demanding role requires Otello to sing full-out the moment he walks onstage, with the famous cry of triumph, Esultate!, and scarcely ever allows him to let up thereafter. Domingo's voice was exhilaratingly equal to it all-dark and thrusting...
...parts?but he sometimes loses impact because of a veiled timbre and somewhat muted personality. Jon Vickers, 52, can match Pavarotti's intensity and puts more serious thought behind his performing, but his is an entirely different kind of voice: rugged, heroic, best suited to dramatic works such as Otello, Les Troyens and Peter Grimes. Nicolai Gedda, an elegant, unfailingly attractive singer, is a supremely versatile stylist, at home in several languages; at 54, however, he is understandably not a powerhouse. Perhaps the challenge ultimately will come from a younger singer like Jose Carreras, 32, though to date...
...heavier tone and darker coloration. By the time he is in his 40s, a tenore lirico is usually ready for roles in the intermediate spin to (pushed) range, like Cavaradossi in Tosca, and maybe even in the forceful, baritonal tenore drammatico category, like the title role of Otello. But he must use extreme care, lest he damage the muscles of ins vocal mechanism. Many a promising Rodolfo who was too eager to tackle roles beyond his vocal weight is today running a restaurant or sitting at a desk on the fringes of the music business...