The inclusion of Rossini's Otello in the opening season of the refurbished Royal Opera House is a bold decision. It will be interesting to see how Pier Luigi Pizzi's 1988 Pesaro production, originally designed for the intimate Teatro Rossini, plays in the larger house; it will also be interesting to see how the opera itself is received. As Jeremy Commons notes in the booklet essay which accompanies this new Opera Rara recording, Rossini's Otello has had a generally rough ride with English opinion, beginning with Lord Byron's celebrated outburst in a letter written in Venice in 1818 ('They have been crucifying Othello into an opera ...').
Not that the English ignored it during Rossini's lifetime. The Opera Rara booklet also includes a fascinating chronology by Tom Kaufman of performances of the work up to the time of Verdi's Otello. The London entries reveal a dazzling roster of artists from Garcia, Donzelli, Pasta and Malibran in the 1820s to Tamberlick, Grisi and Viardot in the 1850s, and Tamberlick and Nilsson in the 1870s.
There is no doubt that the opera was a phenomenon in its day, and at certain key moments mainly in Act 3, properly 'Shakespearian'. This gave Verdi pause for thought, as did Rossini's egregious gondolier. The gondolier's plaint near the start of Act 3 had so mesmerised audiences for more than half a century that Verdi needed to assure himself that the coast was absolutely clear before going anywhere near the subject.
I don't know to what extent Opera Rara's decision to record Otello was influenced by the imminence of the London revival. Speed, though, has clearly been of the essence; to record an opera in September/October and have it in the shops by Christmas is some feat. Yet do we need a new Otello when the extant Philips version is so very fine? Opera Rara clearly thinks so. Though the 1978 Philips recording was made with the full collaboration of the editors of the Fondazione Rossini's Critical Edition, the new set is the first one actually to use the Otello volumes, edited by Michael Collins. It also - at the risk of running to a third full-price CD (the Philips set is at mid-price on two CDs) - gives us more than just the opera itself.
How wise or useful this is, I am not certain. Though a misprint in the booklet gives the timing of Opera Rara's CD 2 as 74'34'' (it should be 47'34''), the performance itself is only a couple of minutes longer than the Philips. What would have fitted comfortably on to two CDs is forced by the three appendices to run to three. Are the appendices worth it?
Two of them are probably not. One of Rossini's finer strokes of genius was the omission of any form of entrance aria for Desdemona. Peeved sopranos often add one, but is there anything to be gained by hearing an example (in this instance, Elizabeth Futral singing Pasta's favourite, Malcolm's entrance aria from La donna del lago) ? Appendix 3 is marginally more interesting. It gives us (not for the first time on record) a taste of what it would have been like to hear a female Otello (Pasta's trick, and Malibran's). As I remarked when reviewing Vesselina Kasarova's stunning rendition of the duet 'A vieni, nel tuo sangue' with tenor Juan Diego Florez (RCA, 4/99), faced with a female Otello, one is tempted to quote Dr Johnson on women's preaching ('it is not well done but you are surprised to find it done at all'), except that, by all accounts, Pasta's impersonation was well done.
The one really substantial appendix on the Opera Rara set is the first. This gives us the Act 3 finale 'with happy ending' as performed, under Rossini's supervision, at the behest of the papal censor in Rome in 1820. Though it is difficult to take seriously Jeremy Commons's assertion that Shakespeare's Othello is so compromised by the 'handkerchief' device that 'the Rome denouement, dare we say it, is just as natural and as convincing as Shakespeare's tragic ending!', it is interesting to experience the changed ending as Rossini wrote it. The final section, adapted from Ricciardo e Zoraide (Naples, 1818) is utterly banal, justifying Philip Gossett's remark that the Rome Otello ranks as 'the most disreputable and cynical revision in Rossini's artistic life'. More interesting, however, is Rossini's use of the duet 'Amore! possente nume!' from Armida for the Otello-Desdemona reconciliation scene; music of such sensuous beauty retrospectively focuses and redefines the nature of the love they once had and feared lost. Amusing to hear, then, and a pause for thought: in an age as sentimental, sanctimonious and prescriptive as our own, we sneer at our peril.
But what of the new performance itself? Bruce Ford's Otello is certainly very fine: 'fine' being the operative word. Where Philips's Jose Carreras gives a powerfully sub-Verdian but none the less pleasingly sung reading of the role, Ford is more refined, more introverted: the characterisation nicely scaled to the style of the period of the work's composition.
That said, Otello is not the key to Rossini's Otello. The oddest aspect of the Berio di Salsa-Rossini text is the marginalisation of Iago and the way Otello is pushed rather to one side ('under-realised' would be a less polite way of putting it). The beneficiary is Desdemona and the two theoretically marginal characters who now emerge as principal players: Rodrigo (a conflation of Shakespeare's Roderigo and Cassio) and Desdemona's Father, Elmiro.
Opera Rara's Desdemona is Elizabeth Futral. It is an incisive, intelligent performance, generally well sung. Her opposite number on Philips is Frederica von Stade: even more radiant, and more than a match technically. Neither singer matches Montserrat Caballe (on her 1968 'Rossini Rarities' recital - RCA, 11/92) in the Willow Song and Prayer. In the song's troubled final verse, they tend to act out the drama where Caballe draws us in with infinite subtlety and pathos. The new Elmiro is good but no match for the young Samuel Ramey on Philips where powerful characterisation is complemented by marvellous articulation and a flawless sense of how to 'place' the voice in the work's all-important ensembles.
In the first two acts, ensembles are crucial. This has the effect of making Rodrigo's hugely difficult Act 2 aria less important than it appears to be at the time. Still, it is there to be sung and Opera Rara's William Matteuzzi makes the most of it. The voice sounds smaller and tighter than that of his rival on Philips, but one relishes the focus of the singing and the sheer virtuosity of the high tessitura passagework.
Matteuzzi, however, is one of the singers whose contribution is often made to sound strangely compartmentalised by the Opera Rara recording. You hear this at the start of the quartet in the Act 1 finale: each singer boxed off, as it were, in his or her own private world. The sense of a shared acoustic is more apparent in the quartet's big lyrical interlude. But then the stretta is undermined by frustratingly backward orchestral sound.
The 1978 Philips recording has none of these drawbacks. Beautifully engineered, it has air and space, a consistent acoustic and a well-judged orchestral presence. Perhaps it is a desire to catch that sense of 'scale' and period which I mentioned earlier that has led Opera Rara to pitch the orchestra somewhat to the rear, engage a smallish chorus and call for a smaller, rather spidery-sounding harp. The latter may be apt to the Willow Song but there is no evidence that back in 1816 the opera as a whole was anything other than grand and big-boned: 'volcanic' (Stendhal's word) in its impact.
Certainly that is how Philips's conductor, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, sees it. Where David Parry's conducting is sensitive, sensible and intermittently fiery, Lopez-Cobos is persistently intense, driving the drama on but always mindful of the need to give the singers the space they need to develop a properly expressive bel canto manner. Von Stade is the principal beneficiary here Lopez-Cobos's conducting of the torrential end to Act 2 and the storm-girt murder scene in Act 3 urging her thrillingly on. (No need, either, for the bizarre rain effect Opera Rara introduces at this point.)
In sum, the Philips performance is the more compelling of the two, and the better produced. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the gulling of Otello by Iago, a scene Rossini sets somewhat unadventurously in a lengthy stretch of accompanied recitative. It is almost as if Philips cast its Iago, Gianfranco Pastine, for this scene alone, so pointed and menacing is his declamation. By contrast, Opera Rara's Juan Jose Lopera is limp, distantly accompanied, and seriously underproduced theatrically: word after critical word - 'scorno', 'invendicato', 'affetto', 'amista' and the clincher itself, 'ti parli/Questo foglio per me' - slipping all too easily by.'