A Quick Example of Why Orchestral Music Isn't Everything

 A quick example of why orchestral music isn't everything....

I could barely see the stage from where my seat was, even if I stood up. I resolved to just hear the music.

The orchestra last night, frnakly, was shockingly horrible. It sounded unrehearsed for what was clearly a major production. I expected better of the veteran Bertrand de Billy, whom on youtube I've heard do great Brahms of all things, but the horns obliterated everything, nothing was together, and a proper Verdi sound was nowhere. To this day, the only proper Verdi orchestra I've heard worthy of the name was, of all things, Washington DC's National Symphony in the Requiem, a feat they did not repeat when they did their concert Otello. This was utterly routinier, and third-rate routinier at that. When someone like James Conlon does Verdi, he deflects from the orchestra with consumate skill and knows exactly how to balance so the singers are heard perfectly. de Billy did absolutely nothing but cues: things came unglued. He gave cues at the right time but when things lost coordination he simply seemed to shrug his shoulders. Would that I were old enough to have heard Kleiber, or Toscanini, or Busch or Beecham, or even Karajan or Levine.

From where I sat, the Iago, Luca Salsi, was absolutely transcendent: posessing an absolutely perfect Verdi baritone, he did not miss an implication on a single line, but Jonas Kaufmann's voice was too small for the role and overpowered by the orchestra that simply didn't care, and the Desdemona: Nicole Car, was 'good enough' but hardly great. If only I'd have been born to see Vickers and del Monaco and Martinelli and Vinay, or god forbid, just Domingo.

What I didn't see was the staging. Then I resolved to stand up for the last two acts to see half the stage.

What I saw was transcendence itself. The greatest stage production of Otello anyone will ever have seen. Kaufmann for all his vocal flaws and ever so slightly tanned, was unforgettable, and Nicole Car rose to the heights of the greatest Desdemonas like Scotto and Kabaiwanska and Freni and Albanese. She was absolutely unforgettable and tear-staining: heartwrenching and delightful in equal measure. The staging, what can one say, it was a real fight where Desdemona was no simpering victim but physically attacked Otello, and the staging did not stint from Otello's violence, he was a genuine abuser, not just a collection of pompous stage affectations. In the last act, the stage was filled with candles and natural light: it was perfect. I was in tears. You would have been too, dear reader. I also realized how Desdemona died: Car resisted so that it wasn't the strangling, it was a broken neck. When she kept singing, Kaufmann came within an inch of applying the pillow again.

I left with that feeling only the greatest performances give you: the thin air of the sublime leaves you short of breath, the pulse raised, the brain dazed. If only the rest of the world had Verdi stagings and singing on this level, opera would live on in the hearts of the world everywhere. Short of cinema, this has restored my faith that opera is the greatest art of all: the only window in art to perceive at once all nine muses. To have written them, to have conducted them, to have sung them, would have been a life of the greatest possible rewards.

Otello is the perfect tragedy through music, one of the 10 greatest operas ever written and if anything, still greater than its Shakesperean origin. The greatest stagings are an abyss. It is not a Shakespearean commentary on race, it's a commentary on romantic jealousy and domestic abuse that takes on entirely new life in the #metoo era. Verdi loved his heroines to a level no other composer ever did, the trauma of losing his wife and daughter never left him, and we have been falling in love with his heroines for nearly nearly 200 years now. The pathos and intrigues of his antiheroes and villains are unequalled in operatic history. In the wake of Mozart's early death, Verdi is the closest we have to an operatic incarnation of the mature Shakespeare: telling tales of eros, history, intrigue and heartwrenching tragedy. A cultural education without him is utterly incomplete.

I

Viva Verdi, viva l'opera.