Dan and I attended San Francisco Opera’s Otello on Tuesday. You can read Opera Tattler’s account, and then there’s another blogger’s thoughts from the same night we attended. Hmm … as is frequently the case, I heard and saw something so different. I dunno. I guess I’m just blind and deaf to some things. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. (And Janet Archibald’s English horn playing was, as usual, absolutely wonderful!)
The only sort of bizarre and sad thing was that I had taken off my black velvet scarf when we arrived. At the end of the opera when I went to put it on, it was gone. Someone absconded with my scarf! How sad is that? It was a birthday gift from a dear friend some years back, so it was the sentimental value that especially upset me … and the fact that someone would take something like that. Dan is thinking it might just be that a person inadvertently picked it up. I’m hoping he’s right. But in any case, it’s gone.
Oh … and two phones went off during the opera, and there is some sort of rustling sound in the Dress Circle that sounds like someone is unwrapping cough drops throughout the evening. I can’t imagine that’s the case, so I’m thinking it’s the ventilation system or some such thing. (I seem to recall this from another time we sat on the right side of the Dress Circle: we had exchanged our lovely center DC tickets for these since we had to change nights.) And what was some woman doing, talking through the beginning of the opera? Just because it began loud and stormy doesn’t mean you can talk in full voice!
Here’s the beginning of the fourth act, where the English horn is featured (No Janet in this one, obviously; I just found what was available online):
and that leads into this, which includes the Willow Song:
… and I can’t exactly stop before the Ave Maria, can I?
Of course at the end of this last clip dear messed up Otello comes in. Desdemona should have just hit him over the head and told him to grow up. Sigh.
