Gerd Wolf
One of the chief pleasures of this live production of Otello from the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden is Daniel Barenboim's conducting. From the opening gale-force blast of storm music, through the crunching and stabbing accompaniment of Iago's "Credo" to the shimmering strings of Desdemona's "Willow Song", he doesn't miss a trick. Everything works at the highest pitch of intensity and the orchestra sticks to his beat like glue. It's a necessary compensation for the shortcomings of the staging: the stolid chorus remains unperturbed by the storm and is directed to perform with unison movements; the acting (apart from Valeri Alexejev) is non-committal, and Alexandre Tarta's video direction somewhat flat-footed. She doesn't manage to make much small-screen sense of an impenetrably murky opening scene, for example, and doesn't seem fond of reaction shots.
In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel - highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns - satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for people outside. As they perform their pieces, however, the country sinks into rebellion, the prison is attacked and looted, and the people chase the clowns away. Latest from the Da-Da-R was the first film made by an artistic production group that had fought for independence within the structures of the state-owned DEFA film studio for years. "Da-Da-R" is a wordplay on the irreverent Dada art movement of the 1920s and the German acronym for East Germany- the DDR.
