Othello/Otello ‒ black or white?

What a problem Verdi left to us in casting his Otello.

It’s not such a problem nowadays with the original Shakespeare. As early as 1959 I saw the amazing Paul Robeson on the stage at Stratford (Sam Wanamaker his savage Iago, Mary Ure a delectable Desdemona). And later (in 1989) Willard White at the Young Vic (Iago ‒ Ian McKellen, Desdemona ‒ Imogen Stubbs).

If only Verdi hadn’t conceived his Moor as a tenor, both of those great black bass-baritones might have been just the ticket. But he didn’t. He demands not just any old tenor, but a genuine dramatic one, with a powerful ringing top and a baritonal timbre. What’s more, one who can act. These creatures are hard to find.

And all that is still not enough. In our enlightened times, it’s no longer satisfying to have a white man blacked up, often conjuring up stereotypical black gestures and accents. Shades of the ghastly Laurence Olivier performance.

When I saw the exciting Graham Vick production of the Verdi with his Birmingham Opera Company a few years ago, Vick cast the West Indian Ronald Samm in the role. Samm was good, perhaps very good. But not great.

So what was David Alden to do in his new production for ENO at the Coliseum?

He has at his disposal perhaps the finest dramatic tenor of this generation, the Australian Stuart Skelton, who has the ideal vocal equipment and acts powerfully, but is oh so white. Alden has left Skelton au naturel, no blacking up. And the result is an unforgettable evening in the opera theatre.

And yet. And yet, there’s still something missing in this wonderful evening, and that is the shocking fact that the Moor is black, not white ‒ a former slave, an outsider and misfit in Venetian society.

All the world before you

I seem to be in the midst of an intensive Australian phase here in England currently. The exhibition at the RA I’ve written about, but in parallel with that I’ve been doing some judging of young Aussie musicians, applicants for scholarships from the Australian Music Foundation.

What an amazing array of talent is out there. We started this year with fifty-eight, whittling them down to ten for the finals at the Wigmore Hall. We were looking not only for talent and capability, but also for potential – something much harder to assess.

Young Australian musicians still come in droves to study and launch their careers in Europe and America, as they have for over a century. If Nellie Melba thought they had potential, she sent them off to study with her own teacher in Paris, Madame Marchesi. Percy Grainger sent them to New York, to the Juilliard School, to study with the then dean of the school, fellow-Aussie composer-pianist, Ernest Hutcheson.

The winners this year were an extraordinary recorder player who specialises in contemporary composers, Rhia Parker; two brilliant violinists, Suyeon Kang and Sally Law; and a big-voiced tenor, Gerard Schneider. Past and present scholarship winners then gave a brilliant recital at Christie’s (heralding their auction of Australian art).

Although there has been a steady stream of Australian sopranos, contraltos and basses ‒ from Melba to Sutherland and beyond ‒ good Aussie tenors have always been a rare breed, so it was good to be able to help one in the early stages of his career.

Having said that, what a fine tenor Stuart Skelton is – brilliant as Britten’s Peter Grimes (above) under Vladimir Jurowski in Birmingham and London, and at the same time singing the taxing role of Florestan in Fidelio for ENO at the Coliseum.