The title role of Rossini’s Otello, like Verdi’s, was composed for tenor. Of course, the types of tenors are worlds apart: Verdi’s Otello is a dramatic, exclamatory role; Rossini’s is, as was customary, high-flying and in need of great agility, although for the time it was quite dramatic as well (Andrea Nozzari, the most dense-voiced of the tenor crowd in those days, took the part). The roles of Rodrigo and Jago in Rossini are also written for tenor (acrobatic tenors apparently grew on trees in those days), and, I might add, the operas have strangely different plot lines (which I won’t go into here).
A few years after the premiere of the Rossini opera, women began singing the title role (Malibran and Pasta); in addition, audiences of the time disliked the tragic ending, so Rossini composed a happy one. I bring these two points up because the current recording takes these variants into account: Otello is sung by mezzo Irine Ratiani, and after the happy ending, the tragic one is performed! (It makes no dramatic sense, as you can imagine, but it does give us a lot of music.)
Would that this performance were as interesting as all of its premises! It has problems: neither tenor is faultless nor even thrillingly virtuosic; indeed, both have moments of near-desperation. Ratiani, though a fine singer (after some wild pitch and flexibility issues at the work’s start), sounds like a woman and not like an Otello–period. However, Patrizia Ciofi as Desdemona is very good, by turns touching and outraged. Paolo Arrivabeni’s leadership is first rate and his players are close to that: for a recording taken from live performances, this is very impressive.
There’s great energy here and somehow you get the feeling that on stage this worked; alas, on CD too many blemishes are too audible. And there is a superb recording, perhaps two, of the work already available–one on two CDs with the young Carreras and von Stade as the unhappy couple, and another, more complete (with variants) on three CDs from Opera Rara with the wonderful Bruce Ford in the title role. This Dynamic set, then, is for specialists and the curious–and that may just be enough on some level.
