DESTINY BRINGS TENOR TO TOWN
Shakespeare’s Moor is a role Italian knows very well
Italian tenor Antonello Palombi has drawn one of the biggest parts in the first Vancouver Opera Festival: the title role of Verdi’s late, great Shakespeare opera Otello, which launches the festival Friday evening.
Otello is one of Palombi’s signature roles — he flew to Vancouver to start rehearsals right after finishing a multi-performance run of the work. I was able to chat with him at Vancouver Opera’s O’Brian Centre last week, complete with bits of Verdi’s sumptuous score wafting upstairs from an orchestra rehearsal elsewhere in the building.
I began by asking how he came to the grand but unquestionably exotic career as an opera singer. “Fate,” he replied with a mixture of humour and intensity. “It was my —” “Destiny?” I chimed in, referencing the earlier Verdi opera La forza del destino.
That bad pun broke the ice, and we had an enjoyable time chatting about Palombi’s somewhat unorthodox path to the stages of the
world and his demanding career. Though Palombi sang early on, his first career was with Italy’s fabled Carabinieri.
As he discovered his true vocal potential, a choice had to be made: he was offered an intensive stint with a company, but on the proviso that he leave his job and devote himself totally to mastering all the skills that go into opera performance. He did, and the results speak for themselves.
The initial stages of his career centred, quite naturally, in Europe. Then — destiny again? — his agent was vacationing in the Pacific Northwest.
She played a recording of her tenor for Seattle Opera’s Speight Jenkins, who engaged Palombi without an audition for a production of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (based on David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West). Palombi rapidly became a Seattle favourite; Oleg Caetani, the conductor of the production, invited him to consider Otello for a production in Melbourne. Palombi was reassured with an opportunity to study the role for a year before the performance (and, as he admitted with a broad smile, “It was on the other side of the world!”). Otello became a significant part of his repertoire.
Palombi specializes in the great 19th-century Italian roles, although he has appeared in a smaller number of operas from the French repertoire. Is there anything else he longs to sing? He regrets that a chance to do Don Giovanni fell through. But he adds: “Otello, Aida, Trovatore, Turandot — who needs more?”
What he’s not particularly keen on is the jet-set schedules that often go with an international career. It was, for example, less than perfect to fly to Vancouver to begin working on Otello, fly back to Europe for a long-standing commitment to sing in Verdi’s Requiem, then immediately fly back to the West Coast to prepare for tomorrow’s opening night.
In this specific instance it was possible because the repertoire in question was all by Verdi. Palombi likes to get the feel of a composer and to stick with it through rehearsal and performance, not flitting from one composer (let alone style) to another in a matter of days.
Otello is a gigantic role that makes intense, even exhausting demands. Palombi thinks the secret is to understand Verdi’s genius for marrying words and music: “If you speak the works, you already understand the musical arc of expression. If your diction is clear and correct, there is far less chance of fatigue.”
And while he well understands the Shakespearean origins of Verdi’s classic, he cautions that this really is Verdi’s take on Otello: Shakespeare’s characters, some of Shakespeare’s situations, but a towering work created with all the confidence and imagination of Italy’s greatest operatic master.
If you speak the works, you already understand the musical arc of expression.