Domingo to present Aida in Olympic stadium
mainPlacido Domingo has rolled out an Aida tour that he has been planning for two years.
The highlight is a performance in the Munich Olympic stadium next August. He says it’s an initiative to bring in new audiences.
The tour opens on 27 May 2017 in Gelsenkirchen, with further shows in Hamburg, Vienna, Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris and Stockholm.
Domingo will conduct most of the dates and function as artistic director. The stage director is Stefano Trespidi, the stage designer Manfred Waba.
Casts include Kristin Lewis/Liudmyla Monastyrska, Ekaterina Gubanova, and Jorge de Leon, Erwin Schrott.
An initiative to bring in new audiences? That’s a bit rich! Aida was trolled around the world in large stadia and open spaces decades ago in a production managed, engineered and conducted by a conductor Giuseppe Raffa. [redacted: defamation] Performances did actually take place in cities like Vancouver. Mexico, Cape Town, Tokyo and around Europe.
The cast is as good as you can find today …
Somehow I doubt that Erwin Schrott is sharing any role with Jorge De Leon, unless there has been some incredible vocal change going on, with either of them!
Apart from the Triumphal scene Aida is quite an intimate opera. How can you do justice to it in arenas ? When Turandot and Aida were rolled out in arenas 2 decades ago the fad quickly faded and there was no evidence the performances brought new audiences to the opera house.