From Salzburg Festival Otello from Salzburg Festival

Unitel and Classica present

Giuseppe Verdi

from Salzburg Festival Otello from Salzburg Festival

Music by Giuseppe Verdi n amazing range, with fresh young lows and girlish highs, full, glowing middle and high registers, a Conductor Riccardo Muti Atimbre of silk, champagne and sandpaper, a great Orchestra Wiener Philharmoniker lyrical-dramatic soprano,” wrote Berlin’s Tagesspiegel about Chorus Konzertvereinigung Marina Poplavskaya. The Moscow native was clearly “the Wiener Staatsopernchor queen of this operatic performance,” as the eminent critic Chorus Master Thomas Lang Joachim Kaiser put it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and perhaps the most dazzling discovery of this Salzburg Festival Otello Aleksandrs Antonenko production of Verdi’s “Otello.” Desdemona Marina Poplavskaya Jago Carlos Álvarez Poplavskaya’s Desdemona shares the limelight on the Emilia Barbara Di Castri stage of Salzburg’s Großes Festspielhaus with her partner Cassio Stephen Costello Aleksandrs Antonenko, an up-and-coming Latvian tenor with Roderigo Antonello Ceron an impressive stage presence and a light, heady timbre that Lodovico Mikhail Petrenko gives his Otello a youthful note. Montano Simone Del Savio Staged by Stephen Langridge Particularly noteworthy are Carlos Álvarez, a powerful, charismatic baritone who infuses his manipulating Jago with Directed by Peter Schöndorfer criminal energy and threatening darkness; and Stephen Length 130' Costello, whose sensitive, elegant Cassio reminds us that this young American tenor is already singing Donizetti at Recorded at the Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg the Metropolitan Opera. Leading the vocal ensemble and the Wiener Philharmoniker with commanding presence is the A production of Unitel great Riccardo Muti, whose conducting is “the motor of this in coproduction with Classica Verdi opera” (Wiener Zeitung). in cooperation with Salzburg Festival for ZDF/3sat With its “enlightened realism” (Die Welt), Stephen Langridge’s production remains within the boundaries of the shot in HDTV 1080 “classical” canon of Verdi interpretation. Using filmic means as Cat. no. A04001511 well as sand, rain and fire, Langridge finds many images that underscore the fragility and volatility of Otello’s position as a social outcast and of his love for Desdemona. Unforgettable is the moment when we see the wronged woman no longer in

her ornate Renaissance gown, but in a simple white nightgown, Design: luebbeke.com virginal, angelic, a lamb waiting for the slaughter... Ali Schafler /