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Review: Metropolitan Opera’s New ‘Otello,’ Bold and Tentative

Aleksandrs Antonenko, left, as Otello and Zeljko Lucic as Iago in the new production of "Otello" at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Broadway directors count on weeks of preview performances when a show can be tried out, audience reactions gauged and adjustments made. The opera world permits no such luxury. All you get is a dress rehearsal with a small audience, if any.

I found myself thinking about that on Monday night when the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a much-anticipated new production of Verdi’s “Otello” by the Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Sher. This is Mr. Sher’s sixth production for the Met; in some ways, it’s his boldest and strongest work. But I am not yet sure. There were stretches when staging touches seemed tentative, when the performance, even with the fiery conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin in the pit and a strong cast onstage, didn’t quite click.

You usually don’t associate Mr. Sher, whose triumphant production of “The King and I” continues its run at Lincoln Center, with daring directorial concepts and abstract scenic designs. This “Otello” has both. Mr. Sher sees the opera as a psychological drama, an exploration of otherness. Otello (the virile-voiced tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko) is an outsider, a Moorish general appointed by the powerful Venetian republic to be governor of Cyprus. When his ensign Iago (the luxurious baritone Zeljko Lucic), a man warped by hatred and envy, impugns the innocence of Desdemona (the luminous soprano Sonya Yoncheva), Otello’s new wife, Otello becomes trapped in the quagmire of his own perceptions, as Mr. Sher has put it. Whom should he trust? What things are true?

The production updates the setting to the late 19th century, the time of the opera’s 1887 premiere. Working with Mr. Sher, the British set designer Es Devlin, in an auspicious Met debut, has created a series of sliding, translucent walls that intersect to suggest vast outdoor spaces one moment, an intimate bedroom the next. The characters move in and around the walls and can almost see through them to observe one another.

Staging the opera’s opening scene is always difficult. A terrible storm threatens to sink Otello’s ship before it can dock; the people of Cyprus, singing Verdi’s raging choral music, look to the sea with terror. Mr. Sher has the choristers staring straight into the house. But everything becomes abstract and murky, with projected images (by Luke Halls) depicting mists, winds and churning waves. The Cypriots — the members of the great Met chorus costumed in curiously wintry garb (designed by Catherine Zuber) — sing this frenzied music vehemently as the orchestra under Mr. Nézet-Séguin plays with slashing fervor. The terrified people are not just watching the storm; they’re swept metaphorically into its midst.

Still, the performance in this scene lacked some final measure of intensity and definition. The choristers seemed less frozen with fear than a little stiff and uncertain. After Otello’s ship landed safely and the relieved Cypriots sang “È salvo!” (“She is saved”), the choristers relaxed, moving about and exuding more confidence. The sequence may just need a little more practice.

In Act II, during the extended scene when Iago plants doubts about Desdemona in Otello’s mind, Mr. Lucic and Mr. Antonenko sang their exchanges while wandering around walls that kept shifting. Mr. Antonenko, not a natural actor, sometimes looked distracted, as if trying to remember where to go. The relationship took on greater focus later, when, in an inventive touch, the two men find themselves sitting in Otello’s bedroom, on the edge of the bed. The scheming Iago, trying to convince Otello that Cassio, a young captain, is Desdemona’s lover, recalls recently watching the young man sleeping. While lost in dreams, Cassio spoke of his yearning for Desdemona, Iago claims. Confining these two singers to that bed ratcheted up the tension by introducing unlikely intimacy, even a hint of homoerotic manipulation on Iago’s part, into the encounter.

This production had already made news when the Met announced this month that, breaking with past practice, it would cease to apply any kind of blackface to Otello. The use of darkening makeup to suggest a character’s race has long seemed obsolete and insensitive. Mr. Sher argues that, whereas Shakespeare’s Othello encounters overt racism, the opera, with a libretto by Arrigo Boito, softens these attitudes and emphasizes the issue of his otherness.

The libretto certainly contains a few crucial references to Otello’s skin color, and Iago says some hatefully racist things about his boss. Grappling with this complex issue remains challenging in all realms of theater. Still, that Mr. Antonenko, a Latvian, had no darkening makeup seemed irrelevant to the conflicts that drive the opera.

What did matter is that Mr. Antonenko has the voice for this punishing role, which puts him in a select group. Though not a powerhouse Otello, he makes plenty of sound and brings mellow colors and penetrating tone to his singing. A true test of an Otello comes in Act III, during the despairing soliloquy when Otello asks God why, of all human trials, it is an unfaithful wife, the only humiliation Otello cannot endure, that has been visited upon him. Mr. Antonenko summoned his most poignant and personal singing here, building to a chilling high B-flat at the end.

Mr. Lucic may have won the biggest ovation of the night for his Iago. His warm, textured voice is even throughout its range. He sings with unforced power and shapes Verdian phrases with supple legato. Though his singing has innate expressivity, he can sometimes seem low-voltage and dramatically vague. He, too, needs a director to bring out his best. But his natural restraint suits his concept of Iago. Here is Iago the smooth talker, cagey and calmly persuasive; “honest Iago,” as Otello calls him.

Ms. Yoncheva, the fast-rising Bulgarian soprano, just 33, is poised for a major career, and this Desdemona shows why. Her luscious sound has just enough of an earthy tinge and texture to balance the shimmer of her singing. She excelled during the complex choral scene at the end of Act III, a high point of this production, magnificently staged. Before the assembled people of Cyprus and the visiting ambassador from Venice, Otello denounces Desdemona and, pulling her hair, yanks her to the ground. The shattered Desdemona expresses humiliation in anguished, pleading phrases. Ms. Yoncheva’s soaring voice broke through the chorus, suggesting that maybe this sweet, loving wife had a capacity for defiance.

That potential was of no avail in the final act, though, when she is murdered by Otello. What other soprano right now can sing the “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria” more beautifully? At the end of the prayer, rather than climbing under her blanket, Ms. Yoncheva’s Desdemona curled into fetal position at the foot of the bed and fell asleep.

Among the rest of the cast, the tenor Dimitri Pittas was an ardent, vulnerable Cassio, and the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano a rich-voiced, sympathetic Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant.

Even at his most exciting, Mr. Nézet-Séguin tends to avoid the obvious in his performances, as was true here. Rather than pushing the music to extremes, he drew crisp, subtly detailed and colorful playing from the formidable Met orchestra. Now and then, there were rough patches. The performance should become stronger as the run continues, and as the production settles in.

“Otello” runs at the Metropolitan Opera through Oct. 17 with additional performances in the spring of 2016; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Daring Voyage in Choppy Waters . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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