When
Sunday, November 12th at 2pm
Estonian House Adelaide , 200 Jeffcott St, Adelaide
$5 entry includes tea/coffee and cake
About the movie, “George Ots”:
Peeter Simm’s biopic recounts the life-story of the legendary Estonian opera singer Georg Ots (1920-1975), whose captivating baritone made him a household name throughout the former Soviet Union. Ots’s story is told from his former wife’s point of view in a chronological and linear style, beginning with his first wedding in 1941 and ending with his death in 1975. The film not only relates Ots’s stratospheric rise to fame, but also provides a vivid account of his turbulent marital life and his dealings with the Soviet state. Although it is clear that Simm pursued all of these story lines to provide a complex portrait of the Estonian artist, the three narrative threads unfortunately rarely come together. As a result, it often seems that Ots led three discrete lives: as a self-made man and cultural icon, as a self-styled political dissident, and as a man ultimately unlucky in love. Of these, the most successful narrative line focuses on his personal life.
Georg Ots
People’s Artist of the USSR (21 March 1920, Petrograd, Russian SFSR – 5 September 1975, Tallinn, Estonia) was an Estonian opera singer.Ots was also a welcomed performer in all the major opera houses of the former Soviet Union, being especially popular at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. His repertoire included the roles of: Eugene Onegin, Yeletzky, Escamillo, Renato, Don Giovanni, Papageno, Rigoletto, Iago, Porgy, Figaro, and the title role in Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon. Ots sang in Estonian, Russian, Finnish, German, Italian and French, and was fluent in all six languages. Ots’s most famous role, with which he is often identified with, was the leading character in Anton Rubinstein’s opera The Demon.
