Tright here’s an everlasting story that the premiere of Verdi’s Aida featured a dozen elephants in Act 2’s triumphal procession. Disappointingly that’s a fantasy, however there’s at the very least considered one of them nonetheless lurking within the room now every time an opera firm takes on the work, one which will get greater and wrinklier with the years: how one can stage in the present day an “unique” story of Egypt and Ethiopia, seen by means of Nineteenth-century Italian eyes?
Robert Carsen’s resolution is to take each nations out of the equation, and as a substitute to set the story in a totalitarian state, someplace, wherever. The pink and blue of its flag breaks up the gray and khaki color scheme of Miriam Buether’s bunker-like set, populated with row upon row of good troopers – the boys of the refrain, sounding terrific. It brings North Korea to thoughts, or maybe Trump’s America, particularly when Soloman Howard’s wonderful Ramfis leads his males in pianissimo prayer as they sit, chapel-style, with their assault rifles – or certainly Russia, which might be prescient as Carsen conceived this Covid-delayed manufacturing again in 2018. Flag-draped coffins are borne offstage within the well-known triumphal march earlier than troopers dance their story of the battle, choreographed by Rebecca Howell; because the scene reaches its choral end result the stage is dominated by movies of an intensifying sequence of explosions. This place doesn’t glorify struggle a lot as feed off it.
Does it work? Sure and no. Verdi wrote an opera that was to be filled with spectacle, and in case you take the visible oohs and ahhs away then there are stretches of music that not have a lot cause to be there, but nonetheless want filling. That’s how come we now have to look at the ladies painstakingly laying a desk, and to attend whereas each single soldier salutes the returning Radames, one after the other.
However on stability, it’s price it. Francesco Meli’s golden-toned Radames warrants saluting even when we are able to typically hear the gear modifications, and Elena Stikhina’s Aida packs appreciable energy behind her sweet-sounding soprano. Agnieszka Rehlis’s velvety mezzo-soprano doesn’t initially reduce by means of the orchestra however catches hearth in Amneris’s later scenes; right here it’s the string sound Antonio Pappano attracts from his orchestra that makes us belief within the sincerity of a personality who has beforehand appeared villainous. If Verdi’s pacing typically goes askew on stage, it’s rock strong within the pit, Pappano and his gamers filling in all the color that’s missing on stage on this dour however truthful Aida.
Aida is on the Royal Opera Home, London, till 12 October.
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