Rossini’s Otello is an interesting piece with a completely different plot to the Shakespeare/Verdi version. It’s entirely set in Venice for a start. For more details on the plot and the not insignificant casting demands you might find the first few paragraphs of my review of a 2012 recording from Zurich helpful.
The Lion Heart is a new opera by Corey Arnold and Kyle McDonald. Their aim, as described in an interview on barczablog, was to create an opera that was more accessible to modern audiences than “most modern opera”. I’m not sure how much “modern opera” they have actually seen/heard but what they seem to mean by accessible is a heavily scored neo-Romanticism supporting a through sung vocal line with nothing much in the way of an aria or any way for their singers to display their chops but we’ll come back to that. Continue reading
operaramblings 