Otello, theatre des Champs Elysees, 9-04-2014

Otello, TEC.

 

It is amazing to see the way Cécilia Bartoli  completely launches herself in a role and does not care about her appearance, because what counts most is her singing and acting. As a true trouper she interferes with the members of the cast with total passion.  She does not mind wearing a   white pettitcoat  for her very last breath, when Otello, a disheartened outcast, furiously and madly in love, stabbed her in a diabolic embrace, while the singing is  excrutiatingly painful and tearjerking from both of them. 

I remember she also gave us outstanding singing in Semele, which  I watched on my telly, and I was shocked to think the producer made her act in the same sort of underwear... and leaving us knocked out at the very end... breathless.


Cecilia,  even in petticoat and bare feet, with blood stains at the front,  is the keystone of the whole  production, making us cry when she has sorrow in her voice, sending us to another dimension with her fantastic vocalisms, delivering Rossini's notes which seem truly to have been written for her,
(or for very similar twin-singers like la Colbran). I simply adore watching her on stage. That is why I was at the TCE on april the 9th, and I can never have too much of Cecilia, even in bare whitish petticoat.

I made the journey to Paris for Rossini and Cecilia Bartoli,  who defends Desdemona's role for nearly three hours.
It was the second time I had seen her in an opera in Paris, the first one being Cenerentola, which she sang beautifully on her Malibran celebration day in 2008.

The period instruments in JC Spinosi 's orchestra also attracted me. Of course they are not always safe, like the inevitable jarring sounds of the French horn.. but I do not mind, J C Spinosi is energetic and very careful with the singers : when you handle three tenors with acrobatic scores plus a Diva who is a Rossini specialist, you constantly keep an eye on the singers and I liked what I listened to that night. The young woman harpist did not go out for the interval break but stayed there and practiced. I got up and walked to see her and sort of stared at her practising  the Saule aria, which is even nicer than Verdi's.)

I was not far from the pit and could see young Spinosi who after the interval wore a dry black shirt... because the white one had been soaked with transpiration... (in French, to "wet your shirt" means to  make a great effort!)

In 2010, I came to the TCE  for a concert version of  Otello and loved the music and singing a lot. The great singer-actress Anna Caterina Antonacci was Desdemona and Otello was  also John Osborn with  a normal orchestra conducted by E. Pido; it was a fine Rossinian evening, and I was thrilled by the beauty of all the ensembles.

 The musical skills in Otello are not so different to my ears from the ones I like  in Le comte Ory or Le Voyage à Reims, but the music has  different meanings, tragic and biting, and the vocalisms have a  moving strength.
It seems improbable that all these strettas and coloraturas which usually sound so jolly and exhilarating  will have tragic echos here.
This is Rossini's miracle!

There is something special in this opera; the music for each role is a real delight, we have three tenors in the main  masculine roles and two mezzo in the only feminine ones, plus another sweet tenor tune from the gondolier who we can hear in the distance...

I loved the setting which gave to act 3 the leitmotiv of the scene: Desdemona is in the huge bedroom, with her confident (this wall has the mouldy colour of the Venitian Palazzo).  She tags the wall with the words  in red, (soon the paint will be dripping like the tears we are shedding, listening to Cecila 's Saule aria) of a melancholic tune coming through the open window overlooking the Venitian laguna:
the poetry of the scene for me, here, is at its utmost: the gondolier's voice is so nice, and the long white curtains are swaying in the wind which will soon turn into a thuderstorm, like the feelings in her heart, which are storming and devastating but which will find some kind of soothing when she listens to the song from her friend Isaura, which she plays on the record player; she feels they have a similar fate...  (a smashing tour de force to have singers, orchestra, and audience dead silent while listening to the recorded tune... on the old fashioned gramophone).

 She is disheartened by the turn of her fate, imploring pity, advice from her confident Emilia,  waiting for Otello, in dismal. She was rejected by her father when he discovered they were secretly married. She knows how strongly Otello is banned from her white social aristocratic circle: accepted as a successful soldier but rejected for being black and therefore, for them, barbarian.
 
This production made it clear that jealousy is not like in Shakeapeare and Verdi the center piece of the drama. Here it is centered on discrimination. John Osborn made it clear in his acting, that he is rejected.  During act 2, when we see him in his kind of den, (Leiser and Caurier chose to create a café for immigrants, and not the garden of his house like in Berio di Salsa's libretto), he is lying on a  sagging sofa, sipping a beer I think, not far from an old fridge: the setting is 1960 Venice, and he is wearing military dark blue navy oufit through the whole opera, so that all the tragic effects are based on his voice and gestures and he is so powerful as to share all the downward feelings right through his arias. They are both rejected because of their love for each other. They are both lost in their sorrow, looking for pity and recognition.

Rossini did not write a love duet in this opera. Instead, there is this amazing last embrace when he  stabs her... The singing for each role in this cast serves the musical text, the music throughout, and it is ouststanding that the team worked on the musical text so much. I can follow Italian when it is sung the way it was  that night, by Cecilia Bartoli, John Osborn, Edgardo Rocha, Barry Banks, Peter Kalman, Liliana Nikiteanu, Nicola Pamio and the sweet gondolier, E. D Hys. Italian words mean so much with Rossini's music. 

Maybe, I will never be moved by another Otello so much... and Cecilia Bartoli is outstanding: even in petticoat or little black dress, this is a Desdemona to remember.

 Rossini, seen through  2014 eyes  looks more modern than Verdi, because racism is still around us and there are gestures in this opera which somehow give a modern outlook which is not felt either in Shakespeare or Verdi (like the  kicks  to a black waiter or to a black corpse  when the curtain falls).

From Youtube( and Mezzo, I watched it several times..) many thanks to the uploader, act3 sc 1

 First short curtain call, with the main roles, to be followed by the  full curtain calls.(TCE 9-04-2014)