Otello

"An amazing range, with fresh young lows and girlish highs, full, glowing middle and high registers, a timbre of silk, champagne and sandpaper, a great lyrical-dramatic soprano," wrote Berlin's Tagesspiegel about Marina Poplavskaya. The Moscow native was clearly "the queen of this operatic performance," as the eminent critic Joachim Kaiser put it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and perhaps the most dazzling discovery of this Salzburg Festival production of Verdi's "Otello." Poplavskaya's Desdemona shares the limelight on the stage of Salzburg's Grosses Festspielhaus with her partner Aleksandrs Antonenko, an up-and-coming Latvian tenor with an impressive stage presence and a light, heady timbre that gives his Otello a youthful note.