Sonia Yoncheva was not said to be ill, and her beautiful timbre was often in evidence. But she was quite out of sorts in the first two acts, the louder singing overweighted toward the upper-middle range, while the softer was “off the voice” and frequently bothered by a slow beat. She improved in the last two acts, where her acting was also persuasive. As Iago, Zelko Lucic did the same thing he has done recently as Scarpia and Rance—stand about and vocalize reliably but stolidly, resorting frequently to a way of sliding through phrases with a straightish tone that shades a wee bit flat. He sang a nicely inflected “Era la notte,” bringing to mind his well-shaped “Pietà, rispetto, amore” in Macbeth. In my experience, these quieter passages have shown the best side of him. Alexey Dolgov gave us a lively impersonation of Cassio, but sang thinly. After making no impression in Act II (see below for partially extenuating circumstances), Jennifer Johnson Cano (Emilia) sang and acted well in Act IV. Chad Shelton and Jeff Mattsey were well cast vocally as Roderigo and Montano, but with Montano we lost the sense of an older, battle-scarred veteran that makes his wounding in the senseless duel particularly vexing for Otello.

It does need to be understood that all these performers, including Dudamel,  were laboring like Herculi or Sisyphi against the production, which is alternately a dead weight and a centrifugal whirligig. Its fate was determined (presumably by its director, Bartlett Sher) in the earliest planning stages, by the decision to collaborate with the lauded and doubtless brilliant abstractionist-postmodernist sculptor/architect/industrial designer/installationist (also rock concert-theatre-opera-ballet designer) Es Devlin. Once that choice was made, the die (or, rather, the plastic mold) was cast. Ms. Devlin is on record as staunchly opposed to “mere scenery,” and she identifies as a child in the Robert LePage, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch line of descent. “We are the next step,” she has said, and so she is (though I don’t know who “we” are)—a further step away from the integrity of an artwork, from an acknowledgement of creators’ prerogatives, from the humility about a designer’s place in the scheme of things that marks the work of the true theatre artist. Devlin’s rock concert designs, for a number of top artists and groups, loom large in her oeuvre, and she defends her work on them against “snobbery.” Before I haul out and pin on my old Adlai Stevenson “Effete Snob” campaign button, I ought to say that designing for rock concerts and for Verdi’s Otello seem to me to have nothing to do with each other; that each presents its own set of intriguing problems; that snobbery can run in both directions (“You’re working for those opera toffs?”); and that if a stinking rich, high-profile job comes up, who am I to say she shouldn’t take it?

Against this is the possibility that Devlin’s musical aesthetic is so malleable, her taste so indiscriminate, that her response to Verdi or Strauss is really indistinguishable from her response to Adele or The Pet Shop Boys—which would be one way of saying that she’s not very musical. Suspicion of this last is certainly fortified by her Otello set and costumes. The former consists mostly of a collection of colorless, translucent, open-sided hard plastic cubes that are pulled about and/or stacked in various conformations to mark changes of venue (Acts 1, 2, and 3, each intended to play through in one location, are by this means subdivided) and to define acting areas. Projections are used for background. The costume design clads the choristers in uniform black, and they follow suit by moving strictly en masse. Sartorially and behaviorally, individuation is reserved for the principals.