Otello – Yonghoon Lee
Desdemona – Karah Son
Iago – Marco Vratogna
Cassio – Virgilio Marino
Emilia – Sian Sharp
Roderigo – Hubert Francis
Montano – Andrew Moran
Lodovico – Richard Anderson
Herald – Andrew Williams
Dear Colleagues,
This was a magnificent return
to the serious opera house after a plague-ridden period nobody wants
repeated. Harry Kupfer’s steep-stepped
production has grown on me over the years. It was conducted by rising Maestro Andrea
Battistoni from Verona.
For my overseas readers: By
isolating from the rest of the world most of Australia avoided the pandemic for
over a year. From May 2020 to June 2021
NSW had either zero or single figure daily Covid cases, mostly in localised
clusters associated with foreign arrivals.
Sydney even had an opera season of sorts while overseas houses were
closed. However, from mid-June 2021 we were
struck with the delta and then the omicron Covid variants, plunging us in with
the rest of the world for another six months.
By January we were using
frequent testing, shorter quarantine periods and a reduction in the severity
and duration of the individual infections, especially in younger people were
noted. As a result, authorities recommended
a return to normal life, schools reopened, offices, cafés and restaurants, etc
were doing some normal business. Since
January a brave opera company has now put on La Boheme, Turandot, Nozze di
Figaro and Otello. Just today, overseas
tourists can enter Australia freely for the first time in 2 years!! 25 flights are to land at Sydney airport
today alone! Welcome, World!
This performance had the benefit
of world-renowned tenor Yonghoon Lee who sang the socks of this gigantean role
(as he had done in Turandot earlier in the season). His singing was more nuanced that his hugely
declamatory Calaf. Desdemona was also
Korean Karah Son sang with the style and dignity required. She occasionally had momentary difficulty
with long, high legato notes yet never petered out. As Marilyn Horne once said: “OK, so you got
phlegm; get over it!” Our Iago Marco
Vratogna was sufficiently evil both dramatically and vocally. The duets were thrilling. As was his Credo. Cassio was under-cast compared to the
substantial voices of the other three principal singers. The other supporting roles and chorus were
all excellent, each managing to perform on a huge staircase the full width of
the stage (one remembers Joan Sutherland on a similar perilous staircase in
Merry Widow!). But no bed for the final
Kupfer scene was just plain odd.
The audience wore masks
throughout and it was about 75% capacity.
The performance received huge applause for orchestra and at the final curtain. It was so nice to see life returning to
something like normal.
For my own case it will be
very different as I closed our addiction clinic after 38 years last weekend. I will just see occasional dependency
patients in the future and hope to do some research. I will take in the last few weeks of the Met
season in New York in May all being well with travel, viruses, weather events, wars
and other global challenges.
Best wishes to all my patient
readers (you must be patient to have got this far!).
Andrew Byrne ..
