Giuseppe Verdi: Otello - The Met: Live in HD

The season continues with another opera by Verdi, inspired by Shakespeare’s play and matching it in tragic intensity. Bartlett Sher presents the Moor’s dramatic downfall with an outstanding cast: tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko plays the doomed Otello; new soprano star Sonya Yoncheva sings Desdemona, Otello’s innocent wife and victim; and baritone Željko Lučić plays the evil Iago, who masterminds Otello’s demise. Dynamic maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts.

World premiere: Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 1887. Met company premiere: Chicago (on tour), November 23, 1891. 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 of Aida 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.

Production a gift of Jacqueline Desmarais, in memory of Paul G. Desmarais Sr.

Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
Librettist: Arrigo Boito
Sung In Italian
Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin

Participate:
Otello: Aleksandrs Antonenko
Desdemona: Sonya Yoncheva
Cassio: Dimitri Pittas
Iago: Željko Lučić
Lodovico: Günther Groissböck

With Greek and English subtitles
Duration: 180'