But the production had an excellent, pearly-voiced Desdemona in Judith Von Houser, and a fiercely idiomatic conductor in La Selva. During the Homage Chorus, in Act II, the mandolin was deafening and the chorus was inaudible. The singers had microphones clipped to their costumes, and every few minutes one of them would let out a mechanical squawk or disappear from the mix. It was by no means the best-sung Verdi of the season for an "Otello" of grand, tragic dimensions, you would have to hunt down a ticket to see Plácido Domingo at the Met's opening-night gala, scheduled for next week. I have seen nine of them, in the major New York houses and at two great theatres in Italy, and, to my surprise, the Central Park "Otello" is the one that sticks in my mind. In this anniversary year, something like four hundred productions of Verdi's operas have been mounted around the world. Verdi seems to have lost little of the mass appeal that brought forth hundreds of thousands of mourners on the day of his funeral, a century ago. Many people ended up camping out on the grass, listening to the music as it wafted over the loudspeakers. "My name has to be on the list," said a youngish man in an Atari shirt. A policeman was shouting, "No more seats! No opera!" There was a lot of pushing and pleading, as at a rock show. Several thousand people were on hand, and several hundred others were trying to get in. The cycle began in 1994, with a boisterous rendition of "Oberto," and ended this summer, with "Aida," "Otello," and "Falstaff." I saw the "Otello" on a sticky night in July.
La Selva runs a company called the New York Grand Opera, which recently succeeded in presenting the entire Verdi canon, in Central Park, free of charge. According to "The Guinness Book of Records," Vincent La Selva, a native of Cleveland, is the only man ever to have conducted all twenty-eight operas of Giuseppe Verdi in chronological order.
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