FROM AROUND THE WORLD: KATONAH, NY.(Review)

Seven decades -- the heart of the nineteenth century -- separate Rossini's Otello of 1816 from Verdi's of 1887. The earlier work marks the start of Italian bel canto opera as a vehicle for serious Romantic tragedy; the later brings this style to its culmination. By the time Verdi wrote his setting, Rossini's was no longer in the repertory, largely because the florid singing it requires had been driven out of fashion by the rise of big voices, needed for French grand opera and for Wagner. But if Verdi's score no longer calls for ornamented bel canto, it still evokes the classical sense of form that Rossini had drawn from eighteenth-century opera seria.

The presentation of both Otellos at Caramoor in July marks the first time they have been available hereabouts (other than on records) for direct comparison. (The Rossini was given in concert by the American Opera Society in 1954 and '57, then in a staged production by the visiting Rome Opera at the Met in the summer of 1968.) The surrounding arches of Caramoor's Venetian Theater offered a congenial visual setting for the Rossini, which takes place entirely in Venice. For the Verdi, which takes place entirely on Cyprus, Caramoor's colonnade still suggested the right culture and period. Audiences are used to bel canto operas in the concert format, since companies are hesitant to go to the expense of staging them; therefore the focus is on the singers. Since Verdi's Otello is regularly seen onstage, the only fresh angle of a concert reading of this work was psychological, focusing attention on the characters, their interaction and emotions.

Will Crutchfield, who prepared and conducted both Otellos, showed alert sensitivity to their distinct styles, giving elbow room to both similarities and differences. As usual, he coached his casts with careful attention to expressive, stylistically apt phrasing of text and music. Carlo Scibelli, who sang the title role in the Rossini (July 7), showed a proper touch of heroic squillo in his tenor voice and coped reasonably well with the coloratura challenges of his music. Matthew Chellis as Iago combined a touch of the distinctive timbre of a character tenor with telling skill in projecting the text. As Rodrigo, in this version a credible suitor and conventional tenor lover, David Adams used his lyric tone to display the character's daydreaming nature, making him putty in Iago's hands. In the opening scene of Act II, however, in his plea for Desdemona's pity, he missed the tone of desperate lamentation required. The least complicated music for male voice falls to Elmiro, Desdemona's father, played with firm composure by baritone Daniel Mobbs.

It remained for Marguerite Krull to achieve the most finely shaded and shaped singing of the evening in Desdemona's willow song and prayer, for which the audience rewarded her with the highest compliment: awed silence. Nowadays, this is the only music widely remembered from Otello, and it's the most obvious example followed by Verdi. Rossini's score, however, also abounds in skillful duet and ensemble scenes, where different sentiments on the same subject are exchanged by these well-delineated if conventional characters. The Act I finale, "Incerta l'anima," for example -- a serious counterpart to Rossini's more familiar comic "Fredda ed immobile" from II Barbiere di Siviglia -- finds each singer reciting the main theme in his own distinctive way, with plenty of dramatic tension the result. And the Otello-Iago duet in Act II contrasts two views of a disputed love letter.

Verdi's score (July 21), built in similar ways but in different musical terms, expresses ...