Representation meets color-blind casting. Is history in the making? As the grand finale of this wildly eclectic Shakespeare-themed program, Yannick Nézet-Séguin has scheduled Act Four of Verdi’s Otello. The Black tenor Russell Thomas appears as the Moor of Venice, whose race and skin tone are a matter of necessarily inconclusive scholarly debate. In a possible first, his costar Angel Blue, who is also Black, takes the part of Desdemona, Otello’s lily-white Venetian wife. The legendary Black soprano Leontyne Price recorded the ravishing solos Blue will sing in this context, but she never recorded the entire opera or attempted it in the theater. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, has any other Black soprano of comparable standing. For the record: Blue replaces the originally announced Renée Fleming, in past years a celebrated Met Desdemona. —Matthew Gurewitsch