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The Telegraph, 22 June 2017 |
Rupert Christiansen |
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Verdi: Otello, Royal Opera House, London, 21. Juni 2017 |
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Jonas Kaufmann's debut let down by a lame and ugly staging
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No, he didn’t cancel and yes, he was very good indeed. Despite all the
anxieties attendant on this wondrous but somewhat unreliable German tenor,
Jonas Kaufmann finally made his long-awaited debut in the taxing title-role
of Verdi’s Otello.
His singing is technically almost unimpeachable:
perfectly in tune, even between the registers, cleanly projected. None of
the challenges here were fluffed or ducked, and the sensitivity of his
musicality was always evident, with some particularly lovely tone and
phrasing in the love duet and the “Dio mi potevi scagliar” monologue.
But as yet his interpretation is cautious; he ventures nowhere near the
character’s emotional edge. The opening “Esultate” had no clarion authority,
“Si, pel ciel” didn’t raise the rafters and he didn’t let rip on “Ora e per
sempre addio”. Nor is he the world’s greatest actor: his stage presence is
oddly diffident, to the point that one never sensed the mighty General or
even the outsider Moor (his flesh, incidentally, was barely darkened).
Otello’s downfall is moving because it comes from a lofty height:
Kaufmann radiates only a dashing young Captain who loses his cool. If the
interpretation is to develop, he needs to radiate a more regal demeanour,
commanding the stage through stillness and a stare, as his great
predecessors Jon Vickers and Placido Domingo did.
The audience
received him warmly, but no more warmly than his fellow principals. Maria
Agresta made a maturely poised and elegant Desdemona – was I alone in
craving more seraphic purity and more vivid enunciation? As Iago, Marco
Vratogna (a late substitute for Ludovic Tézier) was brilliantly incisive and
devilish – perhaps excessively so, as Otello emphatically deems him
“onesto”.
Of the remainder of the performance there is little to say.
Frédéric Antoun was a pleasant but slightly underpowered Cassio, and an
expanded chorus made a proportionately big noise. Antonio Pappano’s
conducting of this opera, a known quantity at Covent Garden, is sharply
energised but falls short of the sublime.
The real disappointment was
a lame, ugly and soporifically dark staging by Keith Warner that is no
improvement on what it replaces. Costuming is generically Renaissance, but
the black-walled chamber with movable latticed panels designed by Boris
Kudlicka evokes a Stasi HQ circa 1960; at no point does Warner bring the
drama any psychological life, and his direction of the denouement is
particularly ludicrous. The net result is an Otello without visceral impact.
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