"Set amid the ruins of ancient Egypt", promised the fliers. The impresario Raymond Gubbay has achieved many feats in his 45 years in showbiz but transporting the city of Thebes or the Temple of Vulcan to the Royal Albert Hall is not yet one. But he's had a darned good try in his latest opera-in-the-round blockbuster, Verdi's Aida, directed by Stephen Medcalf and designed by Isabella Bywater, which opened to a packed Royal Albert Hall last Thursday.
It won't be to all tastes. Amplified opera never is, but the technology has improved beyond complaint and has its place. Gubbay, never one to give up, has wooed opera traditionalists over the years as standards have risen. Yet his core audience is refreshingly different from elsewhere, as well as attentive and loyal. There may be longueurs but it's worth the wait for the climactic choruses when a 100-strong ensemble belt their hearts out, here excellently drilled by Robin Newton. The headaches and strategies for getting nearly double that number, with dancers and actors, on and off stage was achieved with aplomb. Some of the solo singing is admirable even if some is not, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Greenwood, gave secure, skilful support.
Despite its popularity and the splendour of the music, Aida always proves elusive to stage. It has two dramatic high points: the Grand March and the lovers' death by suffocation in a tomb. The first half offers ceremony and spectacle, the second private tragedy. Medcalf's idea was to celebrate the coincidence that the opera, commissioned by the khedive of Egypt for Cairo's new opera house, and the Albert Hall both date from 1871. European curiosity about north Africa was growing; exoticism was all the rage; ancient sites were being dug up or plundered by anyone with a trowel.
Gubbay's was the outfit which pumped 10,000 gallons of water to enable Madame Butterfly to float in her cherry blossom-festooned home. It was no surprise, therefore, to see giant screens projecting the pyramids at Giza, the interior of a painted temple and the banks of the Nile under a brilliant blue sky: a virtual Baedeker itinerary of top tourist sites. The arena itself had been transformed into an archaeological site complete with tent, Victorian-Edwardian Egyptologists, truncated columns, broken sphinx-ish sculptures and piles of old stones. It was all so convincing that my opera-novice companion needed reassurance that the Albert Hall doesn't usually look like this.
The approach, far from vulgar – and having in the past seen lame camels, fat horses and druggy-looking elephants trundled in for the triumphal Grand March scene I have a few points of comparison – was almost too thoughtful. An air of bafflement accompanied the admittedly always slow opening: who was this irritating woman who seemed to have escaped from an EM Forster novel with her sketchbook in search of Mr Beebe and, ahem, a tomb with a view? The programme note explained that she was the famous journalist and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards, who made a boat trip up the Nile in 1873. The over-extended notion was that in visiting the sites she was awakening the ghosts of Aida, her rival Amneris and their love object Radames.
In the first of three casts the Italianate-sounding American Marc Heller, making his UK operatic debut as Radames, was alone in seeing the point of vowels and consonants. He scaled "Celeste Aida" with assurance and acted with the right kind of arms-akimbo gestures needed for this space. In the title role of the Ethiopian slave girl, Indra Thomas was sympathetic and looked magnificent but was off form vocally, struggling with top notes throughout. Claire Rutter and Catrin Aur, both strong performers, share the role for remaining performances. Some of the cameo roles were well taken and musical standards otherwise were high.
There was some rum dancing and the patterning of the triumphal scene, inspired by Nuremberg rallies and North Korean military parades, may have looked more spectacular from elsewhere – higher? – in the hall. Wet-look pre-Raphaelite-style priestesses disported in a fountain, and hooded priests – were they white Cistercians or Ku Klux Klan? – processed around the eternal flame of a sacred wok. Costumes were beautifully made. I was very taken with the prototype satellite dish the viperish Amneris (an effective Tiziana Carraro) wore on her head.
The ending was ducked: instead of being buried alive, Aida and Radames petrified into a funerary couple astride their tomb, and sat stiffly with the look of being strapped in for an interminable roller-coaster ride, which in a manner of speaking they were. But the crowd cheered, and the après comments were enthusiastic, illegibly capitalised surtitles aside. As I left, a young boy was telling his mother how moved he was. My opera virgin found the ending rather miserable but he has a lot to learn about opera in that respect.
You might think it was only a stone's throw from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece and Rome, from the fevered excitement of the Albert Hall to the pure air of Wigmore Hall. It was another planet. In the first of four events in the Bostridge Project: Ancient and Modern, the tenor Ian Bostridge and mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager sang solo cantatas in which figures from antiquity confront death.
The beauty of using small forces is that you can almost do as you fancy: two superstar singers, two fine ensembles (the English Concert and, squeezed on to the tiny stage, the Aurora Orchestra) and, in harpsichordist Laurence Cummings and conductor Nicholas Collon, two expert musical directors. This stood out as an evening of imagination and rigour, as well as thrilling music-making. Look out for it as a Wigmore Hall Live CD.
Bostridge shone as the villainous Nero in Alessandro Scarlatti's incandescent "Io son Neron, l'imperator del mondo" (1698), spitting out each vainglorious syllable with riveting conviction. Satie's "La mort de Socrate", instead, is a dispassionate but affecting narrative from his symphonic 1917-18 drama Socrate – limpid, "like running water", as his friend Poulenc described the aerated music.
After the untrammelled wildness of the raped Lucretia in Handel's "O numi eterni", Kirchschlager sang Britten's late work "Phaedra", from Robert Lowell's version of Racine. She was precise, impassioned and fiery in her agonies of doomed, incestuous love. The Aurora players gave meticulous support, especially in the tangy, 10-part string chords and in Iain Farrington's unearthly, spangly harpsichord flourishes.
Britten wrote "Phaedra" for Dame Janet Baker after hearing her sing Berlioz's Les nuits d'été at the 1975 Aldeburgh festival. No one can ever quite match Baker, perhaps, but last week we were lucky to have Joyce DiDonato in town – joining the illustrious New York Philharmonic and conductor Alan Gilbert for their Barbican residency – to give a bravura performance of that very work.
After the UK premiere of Thomas Adès's delicate, change-ringing Polaris and before some beady, steely Stravinsky, Berlioz's Gautier settings provided diaphanous contrast. DiDonato delivered an artlessly optimistic "Villanelle", a vaporous 'Le spectre de la rose" and a lilting "L'île inconnue" before bobbing off in the breeze to a land of undying love. Not that she had far to bob: the very walls of the Barbican hall, not to mention its inhabitants, were poised to embrace this adored diva whose modesty is an eternal miracle in itself.
* In pictures: backstage during final rehearsals of Aida at the Royal Albert Hall
