Otello SF Chronicle 10-11-02 - San Francisco Opera

But in the last act, she simply shrugged off the surrounding distractions and turned the Willow Song and "Ave
Maria" into a radiant extended concert piece. Her phrasing was fluent and alluring, her dynamic shadings
intimately responsive to the music. For once, the performance's effect was transfixing.
West got off to an especially unfortunate start, singing Otello's great first entrance ("Esultate!") under pitch
and without much vocal heft.
Thereafter, he fared best in the opera's more intimate passages, including a reasonably affecting account of
"Niun mi tema" at the end. But the role's heroic writing left him lunging uncomfortably for notes, and his stage
presence was a grab bag of the most cliched telegraphic postures.
As Iago, baritone Sergei Leiferkus sounded out of his element, as he so often does in non-Russian
repertoire. His dry, rusty tone and unreliable pitch, together with his tendency to bawl out many of his lines
through weirdly elongated vowels, robbed his performance of much sense of danger or theatrical flourish; his
account of the "Credo" was dismayingly inert.
The rest of the cast held up its end reliably, though without much flash. Raymond Very's sweet tenor
sounded strained as Cassio, but Catherine Cook was an impassioned Emilia, Philip Skinner an authoritative
Montano, and Eric Owens, in a company debut, a strong-toned Lodovico.
Sagi's staging shed no particular light on the opera. His main ideas seemed to be, as in "Don Carlo," to hide
performers away behind the big walls and porticos of Zack Brown's elephantine sets whenever possible, and to
have Otello tumble down the stairs not once but twice.
OPERA
OTELLO: The San Francisco Opera performs Verdi's opera seven more times through Nov. 1 at the War
Memorial Opera House. Tickets: $24-$175. (415) 864-3330, www.sfopera.com.
'OTELLO' on CD
Tenor Jon Vickers is a good first choice for the title role, and his dashing, ardent interpretation can be heard
either in a 1973 performance conducted by Herbert von Karajan, with Mirella Freni as Desdemona (EMI Classics)
or an earlier recording with Leonie Rysanek and the great Tito Gobbi as Iago (RCA). Other commanding Otellos
include Placido Domingo, who has recorded the role numerous times -- most successfully in 1978 under James
Levine (RCA) -- and Mario del Monaco, whose heroic performance under Karajan (Decca) is a keeper.
E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com
LOAD-DATE: October 11, 2002
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Sergei Leiferkus (left) as Iago and Jon Frederic West as Otello in the San Francisco
Opera's "Otello." / Larry Merkle
TYPE: RELATED STORY ATTACHED; RELATED STORY ATTACHED
Copyright 2002 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
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