Ronald Samm, tenor, in title role of Verdi's Otello
Sergio Mims sends this link on the tenor Ronald Samm:
MusicalCriticism.com
Verdi’s
lifelong project to reconcile the extremes of the national and the
personal, the grand and the intimate, come to a head in his penultimate
opera, Otello. His well-known passion for Shakespeare cannot
have been the only motivation for his decision to return to composition
with this piece: the internal tensions surrounding Otello’s sexual
jealousy, Iago’s venom and Desdemona’s sacrifice are played within a
tense political context, which is so much more than a mere spectacular
backdrop. Everything is finely painted and psychologically vivid, yet
also concise and direct; musically, the conventions of the genre are
employed with strength, rather than constraining expression.
...
Ronald Samm has great stage presence but hasn’t yet
developed his characterisation to depict Otello’s gradual unravelling.
By making him nothing but a military brute from the start, it’s hard to
see what Desdemona ever found attractive about his personality or why
the Venetian powers hold him in such esteem or respect. On the other
hand, Samm’s singing is mostly impressive in this Everest of roles; he
lacks Italianate tone and style, which gets in the way of communicating
the text, but he does not seem unduly overwhelmed by the difficult
tessitura and has much of the required heft, an incredible achievement
in itself.
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