Sunday Classics preview: In which we get in an "Otello" frame of mind

Here I am thinking I'm offering some big scoop with the Corelli/Zylis-Gara Otello Love Duet, and I see it's all over YouTube -- even in video! Oh well. My version sounds better.

by Ken

Another change of plan: Instead of the hyperambitious program I proposed last night, by which we would have had Margaret Price and Maria Callas as Amelia in extended excerots from Verdi's A Masked Ball tonight and then Price and others as Verdi's Desdemona tomorrow, we're going to scale back and tackle just Otello tomorrow, and tonight, by way of preview, we're going to hear that recording of the Act I Love Duet that I mentioned with Franco Corelli heard briefly but tantalziingly as Otello.

When EMI was planning its recording of Verdi's Otello to be conducted by Sir John Barbirolli (off the triumph of his Madama Butterfly with Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi) with the title role sung by American tenor James McCracken, who was under contract to Decca, the story goes that Terry McEwen, head of the classical division of Decca's American company, London Records, advised his people in London by all means to release McCracken for the project. McEwen, a passionate and highly knowledgeable operaphile of, shall we say, waspish personality, reminded them that for one thing the company was having trouble finding projects with which to eat up his contract (left unanswered is the question of why they ever signed him to the contract), but the clincher was that if McCracken recorded Otello for EMI, that would anger Franco Corelli, an EMI artist, enough to perhaps record the role for them.


TO HEAR (WITHOUT SEEING!) THE OTELLO DUET,
AND OUR SPECIAL BONUS, CLICK HERE

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