Otello

Sunday Classics snapshots: Ramón Vinay and the search for the soul of Otello

Lauritz Melchior sings Otello's monologue (in German, in a 1930 HMV recording) maybe better than I've heard anyone else sing it. (Note: We've got English texts coming up in a bit if you want to jump ahead to them.)by KenI first heard about the Melchior performance of Otello's monologue in Conrad L. Osborne's 1963 High Fidelity magazine discography of Otello.

Sunday Classics snapshots: More Vickers -- "Otello fu," how he gets from here to there

Jon Vickers (t), Otello; Rome Opera Orchestra, Tullio Serafin, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded July-Aug. 1960by KenLeonard Bernstein had such a strong feeling for the scene of the death of Otello as depicted by Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi that, as I recall the story (maybe somebody can help me out here?

Ghost of Sunday Classics: It's a barely fathomable distance dramatically from the end of Act I to the end of Act II of Verdi's "Otello"

Aa Act II ends, Otello (Jon Vickers, right) swears vengeance and Jago (Cornell MacNeil) swears his support (all with subtitles), one of the most thrilling and most appalling moments you'll encounter on a stage -- with James Levine conducting, at the Met in September 1978.by KenWe've been dealing with the sisterly or at least cousinly kinship between Verdi's Luisa Miller and Desdemona, and in case it wasn't in obvious in

Ghost of Sunday Classics: One's a peasant and one's a governor's wife, but both are adored by the locals

Desdemona receives an outpouring of love from the adoring Cypriots in Act II of Cape Town's 2013 Otello.by KenLast week we listened to the opening scene of Verdi's Luisa Miller, as I tried to make my case about the kinship between Luisa and her Verdian cousin Desdemona in Otello, heroines who (to quote myself yet again) --