OPERA REVIEW: AIDA
4 Oct'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

From its debut almost 140 years ago, Giuseppe Verdi's AIDA has been making a spectacle of itself, unfolding on opera stages around the world in ever-increasing excess, aping the ancient culture of Egypt with unrestrained (and often, uninformed) devotion and embracing, in the process, enough wildlife to inform a circus or a zoo.

Most recently, its need for spectacle has forced it out of most of the world's opera halls and into increasingly bizarre locations like Rome's Baths of Caracalla and creating operatic tempests like the one that blew up here when plans were announced in the 1980s for a Skydome staging, complete with elephants, camels and tigers, oh my.

So, of course, when the Canadian Opera Company announced plans for an all new production of the Egyptian classic to launch its 2010-11 season, it sparked a fair bit of interest -- interest fuelled as much by the fact that it has been almost a quarter century since its has graced the COC stage as by how lavishly it might be done.

That question was answered Saturday as director Tim Albery's new production of AIDA premiered on the stage of the Four Seasons Centre. And it's a production that seems destined to stir up a fair bit of controversy, for while it's obvious that the COC has dropped a bundle on this work, Albery has resolutely refused to become embroiled in the traditional game of spectacular one-upmanship that has become AIDA. Indeed, he has all but abandoned the work's Egyptian setting, save for a few rather sad-looking palm trees. In its place, he sets us down smack bang in the latter-half of the last century, when military dictatorships were all the rage.

In Albery's vaguely Eastern European take on things, the Ethiopian slave girl of title, magnificently sung by soprano Sondra Radvanovsky in her COC debut, serves not in a sun-washed palace in Memphis but in what would best be described as a military bunker. It's ruled over by a nouveau riche junta, headed up by the King of Egypt, sung by bass Alain Coulombe, and his daughter, Amneris (mezzo Jill Groves), who is also Aida's mistress.

But both slave and mistress, of course, are in love with the same man, the soldier Radames (tenor Rosario La Spina), who has just been charged with leading the invasion of Ethiopia, where Aida's father (baritone Scott Hendricks, threatening at any moment to burst into flame) rules. When Radames defeats the Ethiopians, however, he inadvertently sets in motion a series of events that can only end in tragedy of operatic proportions.

By shaking the dust of Egypt from Aida's rather drab skirts, director Albery and his design team (sets by Hildegard Bechtler, costumes by Jon Morrell and lighting by Thomas C. Hase) effectively and emphatically take the focus off the spectacle that AIDA has become and focus attention on the human themes and the intimacy too often lost in the sprawl of over-elaborate staging. This is an accomplishment made infinitely more powerful by the combined talents of this gifted cast, supported by the COC Orchestra, under the increasingly assured baton of Johannes Debus.

It is not, however, always a perfect fit and the court's devotion to the gods and the power of the high priest Ramfis (bass Phillip Ens) become all but irreconcilable with the setting. What's more, judging from the audience reaction when Albery and his team took their opening night bows, it seems that while a goodly portion of the COC audience appreciated the deep chords of humanity they'd uncovered, more than a few would have appreciated a bit more spectacle to go along with it. And they just might have a point.