I came to this recording with high expectations and a good deal of
excitement. After all, it’s Furtwangler’s legendary Salzburg
Otello, the maestro’s only recording of an Italian opera. The
most German of conductors meeting the most Italian of composers; surely a
recipe for something exciting and endlessly interesting. At heart, if
it’s historic and we’re still listening to it then it must be
good, right?
In the event, though, I came away from it with little more than a
shrug because more often than not the performance struck me as just plain
ordinary. In fact, if I hadn’t known it was Furtwängler on the
podium then I wouldn’t have given the conducting much time of day at
all. There are moments when it is exciting and interesting to have him
there. The most striking thing about his vision is the slow, expansive pall
that he casts over the score. There is nothing wrong with this in itself,
and he is a skilled enough conductor to know when to tighten and when to
release the tension so that you don’t end up listening to a funeral
for two and a half hours. Only occasionally, though, did I feel that this
was used to serve a suitable dramatic purpose. The opening storm is one
example, which broods with volcanic gloom, or the Oath Duet, which carries
with it an air of almost Wagnerian fatalism. In most other cases, though,
neither the pacing nor the dramatic shaping struck me as worth writing home
about, and I certainly wouldn’t have chosen his Act 3 ensemble or his
Willow Song and Ave Maria over the likes of, say, Chung, Levine or Solti.
The singers are all very good but not that remarkable.
Schöffler’s Iago, in particular, made no impression on me at all,
barring a fittingly demonic credo. Martinis’ Desdemona began in a
shrill, unappealing manner, but she developed a much more intense portrayal
for the duet at the start of Act 3, and she was very beautiful in Act 4,
with a beautiful end to the Ave Maria. Vinay is predictably magnificent, but
I didn’t think his approach married that well to
Furtwängler’s: in the opening
Esultate, for example, the
conductor seemed to be hurrying him along. Vinay is such a great artist that
he adjusts to this, and both conductor and tenor are at their best in
Dio, mi potevi, which feels like a real plumbing of the depths, but
you’ll hear his Otello better elsewhere.
The other problem is the sound which, despite Orfeo’s best
attempts to clean it up, is pretty poor at times, especially the first act
which sounds lumpy and unclear … though maybe I just tuned into it
more as I listened to the later acts. A problem which is undoubtedly most
pronounced in the first act, though, is that when a character moves away
from the front of the stage they are all but inaudible, and that’s not
something the engineers can fix.
So, really, to my ears at any rate, this recording poses no danger
to what has always been regarded as the finest of all the
“historic”
Otellos and that is Toscanini’s 1947
performance from New York - available in umpteen transfers, but the best I
have heard is the one from
Pristine Audio. It has Vinay on better form, it is in much
better sound, and it has a conductor with genuinely interesting things to
say. Maybe I’m missing something, but I suspect that this Orfeo
recording is for die-hard Furtwänglerites only.
Simon Thompson
