On Sony, we do not—not an opera from this planet, at least, an opera we recognize from other encounters, live or recorded. It is the work of Pappano and his orchestral and choral charges that suffers the most from the dramatic and aesthetic failings of the recording, since they so affect the sense of shape and the sustainment of suspense. The tempi seemed to me well laid out and the playing sharp, but there was too much in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the music that I couldn’t get a handle on to venture much more than that.
As readers of this site know, I have written often, and often admiringly, of Kaufmann, and I shan’t retrace my steps here. He remains a musically intelligent, artistically committed singer whose voice is still steady and possessed of the expected tenor pitch range. Its timbre has turned dense and muffled, and his way of controlling dynamics in the upper range (an attempt at mezza-voce; it crops up in the Act 1 duet with Desdemona and scattered points thereafter) has led to an odd constriction that sounds as if the American “r” is lurking behind whatever vowel is being formed. But however one tots up the pros and cons of his technique, or responds to the aesthetics of its quality (and, I must add, however unqualified one now finds his sound for purely lyrical roles), Kaufmann has no business trafficking in Otellos. The tonal calibre, the structural framework of the voice, simply do not accommodate the role. This should be obvious to anyone who has heard him live, or who knows how to listen to recorded classical voices, or who understands the challenges and opportunities of this music. Though all’s by no means necessarily welI that ends well, I was momentarily touched by his emotional dedication to the “Niun mi tema.”
The Desdemona is Federica Lombardi, whom I hadn’t previously heard. Her soprano is of a quite affecting, Italianate quality, and I would guess of middleweight lirico-spinto size. She sings a nice line, and keeps the music alive without offering anything startlingly personal or dramatically compelling by way of interpretation. In a bit of recording-session tattling I find gauche, Thomas Voigt reports in his booklet essay on Pappano’s and Kaufmann’s efforts to draw from her a gutsier protest at “quella parola orrenda” in Act 3 (try Claudia Muzio with Francesco Merli; failing that, Tebaldi vs. Del Monaco will do). It is embarrassingly obvious why Lombardi would find the prospect scary: she has no chest voice. I won’t expatiate again on the implications of this basic functional lacuna in contemporary female voices of all categories, not merely for the strength of the low notes, but for the firmness and centered engagement of the entire range. But the lack of awareness dumbfounds me.
As Iago, we have the baritone Carlos Álvarez, the solid Sharpless of the Chailly/La Scala “original” Madama Butterfly (see 6/13/20). I saw him once, in a Met Ballo some years back, was puzzled that a baritone of such appropriate Verdian color and serviceable technique was not re-engaged (not as if we had an oversupply), and had been looking forward to hearing his pandemic-foreshortened return as Boccanegra. His voice is on the lighter side of those who have succeeded in this extraordinary part, but it has retained its appropriate color, moves with alacrity, and has enough core to carry through the textures of the scoring. His technique stops short of the suave ascending diminuendo we wait for at the end of “Era la notte,” and careful comparison with any of the great Iagos on records (e. g., Gobbi, Warren, Taddei, Tibbett, Granforte) will reveal that he hasn’t quite mastered the trick of keeping a sostenuto grounding under fast-moving, articulated passages. All in all, though, he’s the most convincing of the principals. The supporting roles, coming and going uneventfully through their digital passageways, come off as sufficient without ever really taking hold of their brief chances at prominence.