The Venetian navy was out in force for Wednesday’s opening of Tim Albery’s new production of Otello, which marks Opera North's first gesture towards the Verdi bicentenary.

Sadly, and surprisingly for Albery, who has enjoyed many successes in Leeds, the mariners are about the most stirring aspect of a pallid evening.

The trouble starts early. The opening storm, where Verdi lets fly with the full might of his orchestral armoury, has all the impact of a squall in the Solent.

As sailors and Cypriots gaze into the auditorium, praying Otello’s vessel will make harbour safely, he makes a low-key entrance from the top of the terminal behind them, bone dry.

If one considers the storm a harbinger of the troubles to come, it is a poor omen.

It certainly does no favours to Otello and Desdemona: they hardly need to find a safe haven in each other's arms, a comparison Verdi surely intended.

Their first encounter carried the additional drawback that neither Ronald Samm nor Elena Kelessidi was able to sing consistently in tune – first-night nerves kicking in with a vengeance – until their duet at the end of Act 1.

We might have forgiven these early misdemeanours had there been the slightest electricity between them, but even here Desdemona is fawning all over him as if begging for his affection, while Otello’s anger already seems to be seething barely below the surface.

Partly this results from Samm’s dry tone, made worse by pushing his voice, perhaps because he finds Richard Farnes’s orchestra oppressive.

So the dominoes start to topple from the start.

Recovery becomes even more unlikely after the Credo aria of David Kempster’s Iago.

Here is a man who is supposedly the incarnation of evil. Yet where Verdi suggests the sinister resonance of a mephistophelean mezza voce, a predatory parlando perhaps, we have the full-bodied relish of a banker rubbing his hands over insider trading. A pantomime villain would have been preferable.

It is true that matters improve after the interval. But the damage has been done.

Samm begins to relax and his improved focus oddly makes his crazed anger more convincing.

In the final act, we finally begin to see a human being in the grip of forces beyond his control.

Kelessidi has narrowed her vibrato by this stage, too, which underlines her fragility and improves her legato. Her Ave Maria is touching, but she is not yet the complete Desdemona package.

Michael Wade Lee’s happy-go-lucky Cassio produces some ingratiating tone, and Ann Taylor’s steady Emilia is a useful foil to Desdemona's vulnerability.

Leslie Travers has produced a moveable set which is uniformly grey – all gantries and passageways when not cleared for the dockside and the bedroom.

Farnes conducts with considerable caution, almost as if fearing the worst. The orchestra lacks its usual spice. The chorus makes the most of its limited opportunities, but this production is too restrained to be anywhere near the finished article.