patrikpen: A Long Nocturne in Music and Vision 28 April

mercoledì 3 giugno 2015

A Long Nocturne in Music and Vision 28 April

A Long Nocturne

GIUSEPPE PENNISI describes
an intimate 'Aida' in Rome

Teatro dell'Opera of Rome has made a major financial and box office turnaround over the last few months. From October 2014 to the end of March 2015, box office proceeds increased by sixty percent and performances of operas and ballets by thirty percent. Several methods were used: from early retirement of redundant personnel to programming mixing innovation with very popular entries.

One of these is Verdi's Aida, one of the most performed operas in the world, after Traviata and Carmen. Aida is often produced with very costly sets and costumes like a Cecil B DeMille movie (Some like it old fashioned, 30 January 2012). However, for quite a number of years, Metropolitan Opera has presented an inexpensive but very effective John Dexter production. More fundamentally, in 2001, Franco Zeffirelli (often the author of very grandiose stagings) celebrated the centenary of Verdi's death with a very special Aida planned for the small (three-hundred seat) Busseto Theatre; the production toured successfully, visiting some twenty theatres in Italy and France. In January 1969, I visited the old Cairo Opera House a few times. This was where Aida had its premiere, because it had been commissioned by the Egyptian Khedivé (ruler) for the inauguration of the Suez Canal; it was a small Italian-style theatre for an audience of some eight-hundred in the stalls, three rows of boxes and an upper tier, and required an intimate opera. In fact Aida, with the major exception of the triumph scene and the concertato at the end of the second act, has hardly more than three singers on stage.

The new production is an adaptation of a staging presented in the open air at the Baths of Caracalla for the summer opera season in 2011 (A Delicate Balance, 11 August 2011). The stage set is essential: only two staircases, which become a pyramid for the tomb of the two lovers. Like in Adolphe Appia's Wagnerian productions, lighting has a major role in depicting the various changes of atmosphere. Micha von Hoecke is the stage director and choreographer, Carlo Savi the author of the simple set, and lighting the real masterwork of Vinicio Cheli. I saw and heard this Aida on Sunday afternoon 26 April 2015.

The most impressive aspects are strictly musical. Even though, when Verdi composed Aida, he hadn't yet heard any of Wagner's operas, this work can be considered either as the last melodrama in the nineteenth century Italian style or the first musikdrama with German influence: there are still arias, duets and even some trios, but there are no more cavatina-with-cabeletta, many musical numbers are expanded to a full scene, the orchestra has a dominant role and there is considerable use of declamation (especially in the first scene of Act II). Young Italian conductor Jader Bignamini, who I came across recently in La Forza del Destino (God's Forgiveness, 14 October 2014) is now confirmed as one of the best Verdi musical directors of the new generation, in an opera offered as a long nocturne (with the exception of the second act triumph scene). Bignamini provided the proper orchestral tint and the right pit/stage balance.