Red-faced lady – squat, buxom, blushing in the dusking Dallas sky. Your steel bonnet tips towards the crowds that gather at your feet. They file up escalators from hidden parking garages, file across the plaza from valet stands, file through the narrow doors cut in the building’s tall glass face, file up the staircase and around the horseshoe-shaped lobby pinching the necks of champagne glasses. The lobby is a tight space caught between two glass walls, and as the people tighten into a crowd, they form another layer in this architectural game of onion skins. Lost and faceless in the thickening crowd: a builder, a mayor, a student, a patron-lawyer, a football hero, a curator, a first lady. We brush up against each-other’s jackets, listen-in to each-other’s idle chatter, almost smell each-other’s breath. This is an odd space – so light and airy, yet so tight and muddled. After the performance, standing on the plaza, I watched a long line of individuals descending against the red-faced hall. The clumped mass became its own architectural feature, an undulating line, a human necklace draped around the ruby vessel that held its amusement, its art. It took a woman in an easy-to-spot white frock three minutes and forty-seven seconds to descend from half-way up the grand staircase to the lobby floor below. Inside, faces wore smiles, the patient elderly inched along, and the glamorous lifted their chins, posing to become part of the scenery.

To enter the new Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House is to walk into an air of anticipation – or impatience. Whether intended or not, Sir Norman Foster has created an ironic nod to the Dallas Opera’s former home in the Music Hall at Fair Park: a cramped, wrap-around lobby. Though the Winspear’s space is still much more pleasant in inhabit – its glass and soaring ceilings bemuse – the effect is essentially the same: enough with the pomp and on with the show!

On Friday, October 23, the real show – finally – began.

The Dallas Opera premiered a new production of Verdi’s Otello to open its new space, a beautiful and magnificent opera, but not one that is particularly uplifting or dripping with fanfare. It was, as Dallas Opera Artistic Director Jonathan Pell told me a few months ago, one of the great-patron Bill Winspear’s favorite operas, and last Friday would have been Winspear’s 76th birthday.

The transition from lobby to hall feels like a passage through time, save the streaking chandelier and the metallic balcony fronts. The interior hall is an easy, intimate space that echoes the great European halls. Its design follows its foremost function: sound. And on Friday, the sound took center stage.

In fact, if there was a diva during opening night at the Winspear it was the hall’s acoustics. The Dallas Opera Orchestra, at the able hands of Music Director Graeme Jenkins, never sounded better, which is not as much of an understatement as it sounds after all those years in Fair Park. Fair Park witnessed Jenkins’ valiant warring against the Music Halls’ acoustics to great effect. Despite the gaping hall, he was still able to lift performances in the old space. Now, his orchestra sounds like an unleashed tiger: it snarls, swells, and purrs. Thanks to the new hall, individual instruments can take center stage from time to time: an oboe, a cello. But opening nights – especially in brand new halls – are difficult beasts. The maestro still seemed to be learning his new space, sometimes tentative to overwhelm his singers, sometimes urging them on.

This is a singers’ hall, after all, even if an underground subway stop could be considered more of a singers’ hall than Fair Park’s Music Hall. On opening night, it wasn’t so much that you could hear each singer so well – that individual voices seemed to pop off the stage – it was that the vocal characteristics seemed so much more defined and identifiable. This worked slightly against tenor Clifton Forbis (Otello), whose vibrato warbled widely at times, and whose passing phrases at times felt gruff and gravely. In fact, despite a solid performance in sum, none of the performers really wowed opening night. French-Canadian soprano Alexandra Deshorties came closest with Desdemona’s famous “Willow Song” aria in act four. The piece showed off how the hall helps bolster singers. Deshorties less-than meaty soprano faded into the background throughout, but when given center stage, it cut through the airy hall. With Jenkins, she took the audience into her grief and culminated in a supremely beautiful quiet moment that was all but perfect, had it not been interrupted by the idiotic jingle-jangle of an even more idiotic audience member’s ringing cell phone.

There was no shortage of ironies opening night, especially when the curtain rose on a set that looked disconcertingly similar to the much-hated Macbeth set from two seasons ago (Macbeth, an early opera, being Verdi’s only other Shakespeare adaptation other than Otello, Verdi’s second-to-last work). I was one of the few who actually liked the Macbeth staging in 2007, but the Otello production – the combined effort of Tim Albery (Stage Director), Anthony Baker (Production Designer), and Thomas Hase (Lighting Designer) – worked even better. Comprised of three levels of grey, water-washed panels that doubled as ship’s hull and a Venetian fortress, the stage created a deceivingly simple and metaphoric space in which characters descended to the depths to tussle and sing with the diabolical Iago (Lado Ataneli). Characters were sharply lit, from directly overhead or from offstage, hiding faces or throwing looming shadows across the stage. Late in act four, as Otello, driven by mad jealousy and deception, nears the murder of his wife, Desdemona, the protagonist stands in a bright floodlight that muddles his features, but casts his huge black shadow against a nearby wall. It is an example of that particularly moving stage magic that tricks the eyes into believing they see both the thing itself and the meaning of the thing at once. But on this meaning-laden opening night it also seems to say something about the hall itself: its magic, its theatrical deception, and the relation between the hall’s two personalities – its architecture and its art.

Otello’s grave intensions sung, Jenkins whipped his wand and drove the orchestra through Verdi’s ominous score, and the tragic inevitable unfolded.

Otello plays through November 8. www.dallasopera.org.