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Portland
Opera's Otello
Keller
Auditorium, 1500 SW 3rd Ave., 241-1802.
7:30
pm Saturdays, Monday and Wednesday, Nov. 4, 6, 8 and 11.
$25-$155.
Fifteen
years after Aïda, Verdi came out of apparent
retirement to create his Otello in 1887. Arrigo Boito,
whom he would work with again on Falstaff, wrote
the libretto, which condenses Shakespeare's tragedy.
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"Let death come!" sings the tragic title hero in Otello,
Verdi's great operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello.
"And in the ecstasy of this embrace may the supreme moment
take me."
As Otello--the hulking Moorish warrior, savior and perennial
outsider of Cyprus--sings these words to his much younger
bride Desdemona in the pivotal Act I love duet, you can't
help but root for the guy. As we watch the rebellious good
girl listening to her man of action's tales of conquest,
we don't doubt that she's good for him. Here we see a glimmer
of what that love might have been if the fiendishly manipulative
Iago hadn't been in the wings, waiting to make our fragile
hero jealous.
Yet even as the duet nuzzles close to psychological bliss,
the lead line is still death. There's no doubt this hero
will fall. Like all great tragedy, you see it coming like
a train wreck and brace for the collision. Othello's is
a tumble as great as any in literature or opera because
its origin is his Achilles' heel: that viper jealousy and
the brute internal force that breeds it.
"We're trying to create a psychological sense of the terror,
the excitement, the fear that's going on with these people,"
says Portland Opera director Robert Bailey of his ambitious
new production of the work. "This is not intended to be
a realistic
production."
Bailey says he views Otello as Verdi's pinnacle,
a realization of a lifetime's experience. Yet despite the
director's unquestioned reverence, what's most impressive
about this new production is his brave willingness to take
off the gloves. With a stark expressionist stage that consists
of a series of enormous and precariously leaning mirrored
columns and a dramatic lighting scheme, this is less historical
homage than a daring attempt to free the great work from
stuffy trappings.
To create such a set, Bailey enlisted Vienna-based set
designer Walter Schwab. The two last collaborated in 1996
on another operatic adaptation of Shakespeare, the nationally
touted American premiere of Reynaldo Hahn's The Merchant
of Venice. Schwab, who has the caffeinated edge of a
film director, is equally at home with musical theater,
opera and drama. He has the contemporary artist's appetite
for the shock of the new, and he assumes the audience shares
the same.
"We cannot rely on what we did last time," Schwab says
in a thick Viennese purr. "It is really a matter of experiment."
The predominant experiment here is with lighting--spotlighting,
back lighting, side lighting, everywhere a lighting--that
subtly shifts in color and brightness as the emotional moods
of the characters spiral into psychological hell. The lights
are both reflected and refracted from the aluminum columns,
magnifying the action and at the same time adding a claustrophobic
psychosis.
Bailey understands that such stark liberties of interpretation
wouldn't work with most of the lyric crowd, nor even Verdi's
own Aïda, with its requisite sense of place.
Yet it works for Otello, principally because the
music so reflects the characters' psychological states.
The tumultuous opening scene, with its crash of percussion
and swelling and receding chorus, conjures the realistic
storm raging at sea as Otello fights to steer his ship to
port. You don't need an overt visual depiction of what's
happening. The musical crush foreshadows the tremendous
emotional and physical violence to come.
To buffer the adventurous staging, one might forgive Bailey
for going with known Portland Opera quantities in the lead
roles. Instead, he's staking the show on a trio of singers
making their company debuts: American tenor John Keyes as
Otello; young Russian soprano Larisa Tetuev as Desdemona
(both making their Otello debuts as well); and Italian
baritone Gino Quilico (who has made a cottage industry of
his Iago over the past four years).
The money rides on Keyes, a former lyric tenor branching
out into heavy dramatic territory. Otello is a demanding
role not only for the strength, flexibility and range of
the singing but for its supreme physicality and the subtlety
of the acting. Having trained with Houston Opera and Chicago
Lyric Opera, Keyes even showed up as Rodrigo on a Pavarotti
recording of the work, hopefully learning what not
to do from that singer's cumbersome performance.
"He'll be a formidable Otello," says the career-nurturer
in Bailey, "and this is a good place for him to start."
The cynical might say PO's production lacks the revisionist
sting of the Metropolitan Opera's new ripped-from-the-headlines
Fidelio. Such comparisons, however, are moot--PO
has neither the clout nor the budget of the Met. Let it
suffice to say that if Bailey's vision reaches full blossom,
this will be an Otello out of time--and maybe of
our time as a result.
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