As we walked out at the end of this performance of Verdi’s Othello (sic), I overheard one punter say to another: “It was such a privilege to be here.” And a privilege it was. Just so exciting, musically and dramatically.

The Birmingham Opera Company is one of the great miracles of the British opera scene. Founded (as Birmingham Touring Opera) by Graham Vick in 1987, the company has continuously pushed back the artistic and social boundaries of the form, offering some of the most exciting and memorable musical and dramatic experiences. Perhaps most celebrated was Vick’s Ring cycle of 1990, re- arranged by Jonathan Dove for an orchestra of just fifteen.

They have no opera house, no chandeliers, no gilt. But Vick has each year found a series of venues in the cradle of the industrial revolution, each chosen to suit the work in question – disused factories and warehouses, leisure centres, a Big Top, an old ice rink, an abandoned bank and so on. They sensibly restrict themselves to just one eagerly-awaited production per year.

While soloists and orchestra are fully professional, choruses and extras are recruited from the widest possible cross-section of West Midlands communities and the performances in recent times have been “walkabout” – no seats, no shoes. The lack of shoes puts us all, performers and audience, great and small, into the same boat. They perform in English – in this case Andrew Porter’s excellent translation of Boito – for maximum communication. What’s more, ticket prices are a fraction of what regular companies charge. All of this adds up to a determined effort to “reach out” to people who might otherwise consider opera to be an alien thing.

Those opera companies around the world who are struggling with escalating costs and shrinking incomes in these recessionary times (yet still listing dozens of staff doing this, that and the other) might care to note that BOC has just two full-time staff, working out of a single room in the Jewellery Quarter.

Following King Idomeneo in a dilapidated former rubber factory in Ladywood last year – for me the most exciting theatrical event of 2008 - this year’s production, Verdi’s Othello, is being given at a former industrial plant, the Argyle Works in inner city Digbeth. “The excitement and mystery in trying to find the venue set the tone,” my friend Alison Duffy said to me afterwards. “I felt as though I was trying to find a secret illegal rave venue.”

It’s all a far cry from Vick’s last outing with Otello at La Scala in 2001: Placido Domingo as the Moor, Barbara Frittoli as Desdemona, conducted by Riccardo Muti. Black market tickets for the opening are said to have changed hands for £1,500 and more.

Notably this new BOC production boasts the first ever black singer in the title role in a British opera production, Ronald Samm. (The only other candidate was the black American, Charles Holland, who was Otello in a BBC TV production in 1959. Does anyone have a tape of that?)

Given rapidly changing attitudes to race over the past half century, this event is extraordinarily late in coming, but par for the course in the world of opera, which has been gratuitously experimental in its productions over that period, but reactionary from almost every other point of view.

In fact, I have in my theatregoing lifetime seen two memorable black Othellos, both of them great basses, but both performing in the “legitimate” theatre (as our American friends call it): Willard White with Ian McKellen and Imogen Stubbs at the Young Vic twenty years ago, and Paul Robeson all of fifty years ago with Sam Wanamaker (a wonderfully malignant Iago) and Mary Ure at Stratford. I’ve yet to take in Lenny Henry’s current assumption of the role. In the theatre, it is by now virtually impossible for a blacked-up white actor to be presented as the Moor.

Thirty years after the event, I told Sam that I had been present at that Robeson/Wanamaker Othello, but I think he assumed that all right-thinking people would have been there. I was 15 and still recall it vividly, whereas so many performances of the opera that I have been to since seem to leave no trace in the memory. The most recent of these, only last year, was from Welsh National. I managed to miss the great Jon Vickers as Otello, living in Sydney through much of his glory years.

A black Othello in Verdi is one thing. This production uniquely also has a black Iago in Keel Watson, and many of the other soloists are clearly “of color”, Desdemona excepted.

Verdi loved Shakespeare, studying him constantly, keeping Rusconi’s Italian translation by his bed. “I have had him in my hands from earliest youth, and I read and re-read him continuously,” he wrote. Rather extraordinarily, he never actually saw a Shakespeare play on stage until after composing and performing Macbeth in 1847. His first actual experience of Shakespeare in the theatre was the Scottish Play in London in 1848, though given his limited command of the language, how much of the detail he will have been able to follow is debatable.

He thought continuously about the possibilities for Re Lear, sketching scenes at various times over a long period of time, and eventually, sadly, abandoning the project. But it was a full forty years after Macbeth that he composed his second Shakespearean tragedy, Otello. What’s more, it was only due to the persistence of his second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, together with his new librettist, Boito, and his publisher, Ricordi, that he got down to composing Otello, sixteen years after what had seemed to be his final opera, Aida. Verdi was by then seventy two years old. Six years later came his final work, the comedy Falstaff.

A key difference between Macbeth and Otello is that the former (its libretto primarily by Piave) closely follows Shakespeare’s own words and phrases, while the latter, although keeping closely to the basic plot, has language that is virtually all Boito’ s.

Both in its music and its libretto, Otello is a revolutionary work. Boito reduced Shakespeare’s play by some three quarters, ditching the play’s first act entirely, and compressing the drama to its essentials, yet retaining sharp definition of the three main protagonists. By the same token, Verdi’s music has a relentless intensity scarcely hinted at in his earlier works. No more rum-ti-tum. That kind of passage-work is entirely banished.

A great mistake, often in evidence, is to assume that, because Otello is late Verdi, it is appropriate to sing it in a style informed by verismo. This is quite wrong. The arrival of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana was not until three years after the première of Otello, and singing styles changed gradually over the ensuing decade.

What’s more, we do not have to make guesses as to what three of Verdi’s original singers from 1887 sounded like. Taking advantage of the newfangled technology of sound recording, his first Otello, Francesco Tamagno (born in 1850), left us key parts of the role in 1903, as did his first Iago, Victor Maurel (born 1848). Both were coached at length in their roles by the composer. His original Lodovico, the bass Francesco Navarini, also recorded extracts from Verdi operas, but unfortunately not from Otello. Required listening, one might think, for all aspiring Desdemonas, Iagos and Othellos would also include Nellie Melba (also coached by Verdi), Titta Ruffo and Enrico Caruso (the latter pair recorded in the duet from Act II in 1914). Another vital recorded document is Toscanini’s complete recording (with Ramon Vinay as Otello) from 1947. The maestro was closely associated with Verdi from his earliest years.

While late Verdi anticipates verismo in the use of greater theatrical realism and psychological truth, his writing for the voice expects the performer to be fully conversant with (and proficient in) bel canto practice. What we can deduce from all the early recorded evidence is that many of the hallmarks of verismo singing – the wide, slow vibrato and the throaty sob (both employed for example by José Carreras in all his Verdi recordings) - are entirely inappropriate.

Verdi expressed himself clearly on his conception of the three leading roles. In a letter to Giulio Ricordi, he wrote: “Desdemona is a part where the thread, the melodic line, never stops from the first to the last note. Just as Iago must only declaim and sneer. Just as Otello, now warrior, now passionate lover, now cast down into the mire, now as a ferocious savage, must sing and howl; so Desdemona must always sing.”

While I often write about opera and singing, I’ve always had an aversion to doing reviews of live performances. I want to go in hoping to learn and expecting to enjoy – and this attitude does not fit well with “criticism”. I particularly don’t care for the kind of approach that seems to start from the idea that there exists some kind of “Golden Ideal” for each role, against which the performance in question can be measured. And I hate being Beckmesser, making notes continuously as the performance proceeds – so I don’t.

In the case of Verdi’s Othello, what I can tell you is that the Othello (Ronald Samm) is no Tamagno, the Iago (Keel Watson) no Ruffo, and the Desdemona (Stephanie Corley) no Melba. In a performance such as this, that is just not the point. That said, they each sing and act well and with enormous commitment. Corley gave Desdemona a fragile beauty and grace. Watson’s Iago exuded malevolence and hidden power – the sergeant dreaming of one day becoming president. The distress of Samm’s Othello was palpable.

The Birmingham Opera Company Orchestra under Stephen Barlow, unusually not in a pit but high above us, played with style, tenderness and attack – shades of Edward Downes? The chorus, all amateurs, sang with passionate joy and much precision. I was reminded in this setting just how much Othello is a chorus-centred work.

But it’s the production itself which is so extraordinarily effective. Graham Vick uses the whole vast space of the currently disused Argyle Works to its fullest. At one moment the singers, chorus and extras are spread out amongst us, the audience; at another, we are corralled into a tight pen, the singers giving forth in the centre of the wide open spaces.

Its opening was quite terrifying. We discovered that several of the people around us were in fact singers and actors as the storm broke loose - suicide bombers were amongst them, “faceless but glowing”, as my friend, Richard Sykes, put it to me. And quite soon we were all of us dancing hand in hand in improvised circles, celebrating the arrival home of the conquering heroes. Throughout, we, the audience, became complicit in the unfolding tragedy.

Vick has updated the action to current times, locating the action in a black African country (Uganda?) where Christianity and Islam, black and white, military and civilian, uneasily coexist, and where males expect to be obeyed.

There are further performances on 7, 9, 12, 14, 17 and 19 December. Don’t miss it.

Roger Neill
Opera Britannia

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