London has its dowdiest Aida in 50 years

Alastair Macaulay reviews Covent Garden’s new Aida, exclusively for Slipped Disc:

by Alastair Macaulay

The Royal Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Aida is visually the least glamorous account of this opera I’ve seen in fifty years, but not the dullest. As directed by Robert Carsen, Verdi’s Egypt has become a modern military regime. Almost everyone – soldiers, slaves, even rebels – is dressed by Annemarie Woods in uniforms of grey or beige, amid brutalist urban architecture designed by Miriam Buether in matching tones.

In the Triumphal Scene, we honour the glorious dead, their coffins raised and born in procession. The dances become displays of athletic military training. The King gets the only uniforms with colour. For the Triumphal Scene, his daughter Amneris is allowed to power-dress in a red suit. Aida, being a slave, is the most completely grey-clad character of all – she gets to wear a grey mac over her grey maid’s uniform.

There are too many machine guns: every soldier (dozens) is given one. When Aida’s rebel father Amonasro turns up by the Nile (or wherever we are) with six henchmen, they, too, are bearing machine guns. At that scene’s climax, Amonasro, spotting Amneris, announces (according to the libretto) that killing her will be the climax of his plan – but, instead of massacring Egyptians, he then holds a knife to his own daughter’s throat. Some mistake here, surely? (You expect Amneris to encourage him to slit her rival’s throat.) I presume someone will tidy up this muddle. Otherwise the production works on its own terms, though I’m not sure the military are well advised to lock the traitor Radamès up in a cellar with what look like, to my inexpert eyes, a hundred nuclear warheads.

It’s a cold, completely watchable production, but not one that breathes inner life in the acting of its lead couple, Elena Stikhina’s Aida or Francesco Meli’s Radamès. Stikhina sings the taxing title role with apparent effortlessness, apart from a pinched high C in “O patria mia”; it’s astounding to hear the radiant bloom throughout her voice undiminished over four acts. But she doesn’t point words; and her Aida is a mousy, conventional character, without individuality. Meli looks the least relaxed character onstage; he sounds like a lyric tenor who is in the process of beefing up his voice for heroic roles of this calibre, with alternating strains of poetry and machismo that don’t quite cohere persuasively.

Elsewhere the production, which returns later this season with a different cast, has more oomph. Above all, from the prelude onward, the conducting of Antonio Pappano ideally reconciles this opera’s private and public voices. The orchestral lucidity is often breath-taking, with, even in this highly familiar score, many details making new impressions: the massive ascending staccati in the Consecration Scene, the subdued woodwind framing Aida’s anxious perturbation of spirit when alone with Amneris. He works particular wonders with the male chorus, whose sustained quiet singing in the Consecration and Trial Scenes becomes a riveting embodiment of the militia at prayer: wholly impersonal, rapt, focused.

For Covent Garden, the two big discoveries – both making their debuts here – are the Polish mezzo Agnieszka Rehlis (Amneris) and the American bass Soloman Howard (the high priest Ramfis). Rehlis, though without the power of a Fiorenza Cossotto or a stylish Italian accent, is glamorous, intense, and potent. Words matter to her; physically, she registers even when not singing. Howard is powerful of frame and voice, handsome, and capable of wonderful quiet: his solo beginning of the Consecration hymn (“Nume, custode e vindice”), both mellifluous and hushed, is the most sheerly gorgeous singing of the evening. As Amonasro, Ludovic Tézier, who made so strong an impression in Covent Garden’s Forza del destino in 2019, has presence and power.

Still, there’s a heartlessness about this nearly monochrome staging. When Aida is inspiring, it becomes one of the nineteenth century’s great dramas about liberty. When all forms of other liberty are blocked to the lead couple, they sing of leaving this world for the new radiance of eternity. If later casts can make that spiritual sublimity convincing, they will give this production the larger dimension it lacks.

photo: ROH/Tristram Kenton