Opera - Patrick O'Connor compares hit-and-miss performances of Verdi's Otello

The proposed conductor for Glyndebourne's production of Verdi's Otello - never before heard in Sussex - was Valery Gergiev, with Vladimir Galuzin in the title role. Although contracts were never signed, it seemed more than an ironic coincidence that the same week the new production at Glyndebourne opened, Galuzin and Gergiev were at Covent Garden in the same opera.

Otello was the most successful staging in the Kirov's patchy Tribute to Verdi fortnight at the Royal Opera last month. The performance was dominated, not to say overwhelmed, by Galuzin. With his dark-hued, almost bass-baritone lower range, allied to high notes of an unrivalled open, clarion tone, he has the potential to be the greatest Otello of our time, and maybe the leading heroic tenor of the age. Sadly, the way he was costumed, directed, and even conducted, told against him at almost every turn. The make-up artist had applied the burnt cork so that he looked like a music-hall singer out to croon "Lily of Laguna". Nevertheless, when it came to "Dio! mi potevi scagliar", he knelt at the front of the stage and took the house by storm.

Nikolai Putilin was a wildly melodramatic Iago, Olga Guriakova a fragile, less than ideal Desdemona. Semyon Pastukh's set, a collection of huge pieces of armour and artillery, had a raw symbolism, but the costumes by Galina Solovieva, though clearly based on 15th-century Venetian paintings, were ludicrous, the toque-like hats and curly wigs evoking not Vittore Carpaccio but Harpo Marx.

Peter Hall's production at Glyndebourne places the action at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The women wear high-waisted empire-line gowns with feathered bonnets; the men are in frock-coats and curly-brimmed toppers, the soldiers in red-striped trousers and short jackets. It all looks very English. John Gunter's set, an open, galleried structure, allows for maximum eavesdropping and spying - every conversation is overheard. When the Venetian contingent arrive at the end of Act 3, they sit around on folding campaign chairs, with no throne or pomp. There are several effective visual moments. In Act 2, during the chorus of children, Desdemona is partly obscured from view by an ornamental screen, so that the focus is on Otello and Iago, watching her. When Otello enters in the last act, it is through curtains behind Desdemona's bed, and at first it is just his shadow cast tall by backlighting.

Hall's conception of the piece is all veered towards Iago, played by Anthony Michaels-Moore not as a dark, demonic villain, but a gently smiling Uriah Heep. As each part of his plot unfolds, he continues to look on in an amused way, but even when he is unmasked, the smile stays fixed. In the Credo at the beginning of Act 2, he sings with his feet up on the desk, a lazy wretch. It works within the context of the whole staging, but somehow I cannot believe this is Verdi and Boito's Iago. ("He is the true demon," wrote Verdi.)

Neither Michaels-Moore nor David Rendall, in the title role, has the Italianate voice that one longs to hear in these parts, yet both sing and act with command and thorough involvement. Susan Chilcott's Desdemona seems more mature than usual; there is a suggestion that, until the onset of Otello's jealousy, she controlled him. Kurt Streit is an uncharacteristically charismatic and virile Cassio, Jean Rigby a vivid Emilia. The real star of the evening, however, is Richard Farnes, who conducts with all the tension and sweeping drama that the score demands, and which was missing in so much of the Kirov evening. Scenes that often pass for nothing suddenly become vital, such as the moment at the beginning of Act 3 when Otello takes Desdemona's hand and examines it. ("Give me your hand, this hand is moist, my lady.")

This Glyndebourne staging will develop and probably become a fixture. The well-choreographed chorus sounds thrilling in the opening quayside scene, as does the climax of Act 3. Hearing Otello in a theatre the size of Glyndebourne brings it much closer to Verdi's earlier operas in scale and intimacy.

Otello is at Glyndebourne Festival Opera (01273 813 813) until 25 August

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