MET OPERA LIVE IN HD: OTELLO

Posted by Layla on October 17, 2015 in MET OPERA LIVE IN HD

GIUSEPPI VERDI

2015-2016 HD OPERA SEASON

OCTOBER 17, 2015 @ 12:55 PM

RUN TIME: 2 HRS 46 MIN

Director Bartlett Sher’s new production of Verdi’s masterful Otello, which opened the Met season last September, returns for a second run, with Aleksandrs Antonenko in the title role and Željko Lučić as Iago reprising their performances. Hibla Gerzmava joins the cast as Desdemona, and Adam Fischer conducts.

Often cited as Italian opera’s greatest tragedy,Otello is a miraculous union of music and drama, a masterpiece as profound philosophically as it is thrilling theatrically. Shakespeare’s tale of an outsider, a great hero who can’t control his jealousy, was carefully molded by the librettist Arrigo Boito into a taut and powerful opera text.Otello almost wasn’t written: following the success ofAida and his setting of the Requiem mass in the early 1870s, Verdi considered himself retired, and it took Boito and publisher Giulio Ricordi several years to persuade him to take on a major new work

Text courtesy of The Metropolitan Opera website:  http://www.metopera.org

PHOTOS: /Metropolitan Opera