Otello, Opera North, Grand Theatre Leeds, review

Celebrating Verdi’s bicentenary is a good enough reason for Opera North to make its first assault on the heights of his glorious Otello. But another incentive is the company’s music director, Richard Farnes, who won his spurs conducting this magnificent score at Glyndebourne 12 years ago.

Then he was still a greenhorn; now he seems like a master in his prime.

This Otello was no stately Victorian grand opera but an urgent drama of human crisis, painted in vivid colours through richly expressive orchestral playing, and kept sharp at the edges: the searing precision with which he ignited the opening flash of lightning adumbrated all that was to follow.

Yet despite the overall propulsion and crackling electricity of his interpretation, Farnes remained considerate of his singers throughout and handled the trickiest episode – the complex Act 3 ensemble – with rare adroitness. A terrific achievement.

Tim Albery’s staging moves Shakespeare’s Renaissance Cyprus to a US naval base, presumably during the Second World War. In Leslie Travers’s flexible set, the concept is intelligently handled, making vivid both the racial motive behind Iago’s vendetta and the military context surrounding the personal tragedy (although these aren’t issues which Boito’s libretto makes much of).

The singers have been sensitively directed, and their efforts are as good as can reasonably be expected for an opera that even Salzburg and the Met struggle to cast.

In the title role, Ronald Samm is stolid and somewhat prosaic – no Lion of Venice he, and his cry of “Esultate” was scarcely clarion – but he sings prudently within his means and acts conscientiously. He needs more swagger.

Elena Kelessidi, a favourite at Covent Garden in the 1990s, returns to Britain after a long absence to sing Desdemona. Her soprano is on the acidic side and she cannot melt a note, but once past the Act 1 love duet, she becomes touchingly sincere and vulnerable: her humiliation in Act 3 was powerfully done, and “the Willow Song” had doom-laden intensity.

David Kempster is a bluff, forthright Iago, who could benefit from more venomously spat consonants; Michael Wade Lee’s Cassio was passable, but why import an American for this secondary role? The augmented chorus kicked up a storm.

This is Opera North back on top form, with the conductor undoubtedly the star of the show: how long before Richard Farnes is recognised as a national treasure?

Until Feb 16, then touring to Newcastle, Belfast, Salford and Nottingham. Box office: 0113 243 9999; www.operanorth.co.uk