Otello, Grange Park Opera review ★★★★★

As a young man, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini played the cello in the first performance, in 1887, of Verdi’s Otello at La Scala, Milan. Italy’s leading opera composer was then 73 and had not produced a new opera for more than 15 years. The nation held its breath.

Italy need not have worried: in Otello, Verdi created a landmark in 19th-century Italian opera. The young Toscanini was said to have been so overwhelmed by the success of the opera that he galloped home after the performance, dragged his startled mother out of bed in the middle of the night and commanded: ‘On your knees! Thank God for a masterpiece!’

It is however a challenging masterpiece – but Grange Park Opera likes a challenge. It has assembled an extraordinary cast, all three principals British singers with international careers, and all of them making their debuts in their rôles.

Gwynne Hughes Jones as Otello in the opera based on Shakespeare’s play has arrived at this Everest of the tenor repertoire via two decades singing many other Verdi roles, and his experience shows. Trumpet-toned (almost to a fault) in the first two acts, he produced some beautiful soft singing in the final act, and his death scene is genuinely moving.

Simon Keenlyside's taunting Iago. Photo: Marc Brenner

Director David Alden has updated the action to the end of the Second World War, and his Otello is white and Christian, in khaki like his men. There is little therefore to convey the sense that Otello is a charismatic character whose tragic flaw will destroy his golden life, his golden career and his golden love for Desdemona.

Alden’s aim seems to have been to avoid melodrama at any cost and this also affected Simon Keenlyside’s portrayal of Iago. Verdi had seriously considered calling the opera ‘Iago’, so fascinated was he by Shakespeare’s portrayal of malignant evil, and Alden reflects this by having Iago appear, a glowering presence, in front of the curtain at the start of every Act.

A run-down hotel, in Charles Edwards’s design, has been requisitioned by the military. With Otello as a less-than-exceptional character, Iago’s jealous determination to destroy him is difficult to understand and, although strongly sung, Keenlyside’s Iago seems strangely impassive. Only in the closing moments, as he watches Otello’s death-throes with neither triumph or enjoyment, do we see a sociopath, incapable of feeling any human emotion.

There is, thankfully, much human emotion in Elizabeth Llewelyn’s luminous portrayal of Desdemona. Llewelyn’s luscious brandy-and-cream soprano is perfectly produced from the top to the bottom of her voice. She has the vocal heft to ride the huge ensemble at the end of Act Three and still scale down to a poised and heartbreaking ‘Willow Song’ and ‘Ave Maria’ in the final scene as she waits for Otello to come to her bedchamber.

David Alden sets his production in the 1940s. Photo: Marc Brenner

Tim Mitchell’s lighting is almost a fourth principal in this drama, often illuminating the singers from below, throwing their shadows onto the wall behind so that they are literally as well as figuratively overshadowed by tragedy and evil.

Conductor Gianluca Marcianò’s workmanlike performance in the pit never matched the drama’s heights, and the orchestral textures of the Gascoigne Orchestra consistently failed to shimmer. They are not helped by the theatre pit which is deep and extends back far beneath the stage. The pit is also surrounded by a solid wooden partition which prevents the full orchestral sound from reaching the stalls, where even the loudest brass fanfare sounds muffled and underpowered.

By contrast, the orchestral sound in the balconies is vibrant and unimpeded. Grange Park Opera should urgently consider how to improve the orchestral sound for their patrons in the stalls, perhaps by replacing this barrier, before next season’s trio of operas, Massenet’s Werther, Puccini’s Tosca and, the orchestral daddy of them all, Wagner’sTristan und Isolde.

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Otello is sung in Italian with English surtitles. Further performances are on 30 June; 3, 6, and 9 July