The Wall Streel Journal

It was a conscious decision to turn in my tickets for Placido Domingo singing a concert performance of “Parsifal” with the Royal Opera late last month. I thought it would be more newsworthy and more fun to catch one of the three performances of producer Harvey Goldsmith’s “Aida: The Operama Spectacular” at the (more-or-less) 20,000-seat Earl’s Court. Why not? Nothing wrong with arena opera. I saw my first-ever opera in the 1950s at the Cincinnati zoo, and in the early ’60s attended a performance of “Aida” at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome that (memory says) had elephants, camels and four white horses drawing Radames’s chariot in the triumphal march. Earl’s Court exhibition center in West London is an odd place to have an opera, but then, it’s an odd place to have anything except mega-shows like an ideal home exhibition, or motor and boat shows. The hall is a vast empty shell a few stories high, inside which more or less anything can be erected, including this production’s (relatively shallow) 70 meter by 20 meter, four-tiered stage, as well as the temporary seating for the 60,000 who were expected to pay between $37 and $50 to attend. (The seats were not comfortable: As you walked into the cavernous hall there were stands renting much-needed cushions for $3.70 each.) The budget was just under $5 million, low for an operation that must have involved about 1,000 people — and, not surprisingly, the statistics are more impressive than the production itself. Maestro Giuseppe Raffa, who created “Aida: The Opera Spectacular” for Operama, has already done the gigs in North America, Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Holland and Switzerland, and Mr. Goldsmith could be relied on to bus in enough first-time operagoers from all over Britain to fill Earl’s Court. Nearly 500 extras were required in the cast, including 11 bodybuilders, 20 ministers, six trumpeters, 120 soldiers, 80 rich people, 32 priestesses and 32 slaves. They were recruited by an advertisement in London’s Evening Standard, and they all attended their six long, boring rehearsals and three three-hour performances for nothing but a pair of free tickets, free soft drinks and a line to put in their sum. In exchange they signed a contract that prohibited their drinking alcoholic beverages or taking drugs before performances, agreed to liability for delays, and promised not to wear sunglasses onstage or to eat or drink in costume. There were 1,500 costumes, sometimes a little hilarious (as were the priests’ headdresses that looked like distorted white bowling balls — or perhaps upside down washbasins), designed by Ruggero Vitrani. Why did they volunteer? “In the heart of everyone,” Mr. Raffa told the Independent newspaper, “is this thing that makes them want to be on show, and to take part in the biggest show in the world has got to be part of everybody’s fantasies. The heart they’re going to put into this you’d never find in any paid people. They really love it, and put everything in. People form Aida clubs after the production is over. They ask me to parties all the time.” The truth is that the spear-carriers were only a dot on the panoramic stage, unless you were, as I was for the second half, in the front few rows of press seats. In the 30th of the hundred or so rows of stalls seats where I passed the first half (the ushers simply couldn’t cope with the numbers, so we had to take the first empty seats), you couldn’t tell which one was singing, even when there was more than one soloist on stage. The chorus was positioned in the pit, to the right of the orchestra, so that it could at least be amplified en bloc. This did not improve its performance. The Philharmonia Chorus was, I’m sorry to say, so ragged it was shaggy. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Mr. Raffa himself, battled valiantly, if not to much avail. In “Celeste Aida” the violins sounded as though they had been amplified individually, with piercingly tinny staccato. In fact, things were so arranged that, except for the soloists, nobody on stage ever made a sound. So unfortunate was the amplification that the soloists would have been better served if they had mimed to a recording of their own voices. At the front of Earl’s Court, each singer carried his own echo with him, with a nanosecond delay that had the effect of turning solos into and, even more interestingly, the duets between Radames and Amneris, and for Radames and Aida, into ghostly quartets. It was tough on Dennis O’Neill to sing his umpteenth Radames into this monster sound system, but even worse for Malgorzata Walewska, whose breathy top register and solid chest voice (which sometimes seemed to emanate from a different character altogether) might have made her a really good Amneris, if we could only have heard something of her singing. It is not really possible to act on a 70-meter stage, but she flung herself about it as though she meant it. Otherwise the maxim of the direction was “stand and sing.” Wilhelmenia Fernandez, in the title role, obeyed this practical injunction pretty literally, but (when I could actually hear her) she seemed to be in fine, sweet voice, and managed to float her top C in the Nile aria with what would have been an authentic pianissimo, were it not for the harsh and unforgiving amplification. Brydon Paige’s hippity-hoppity I’m-a-character-from-an-Egyptian-frieze choreography was a very bad joke indeed. Yet there was something enjoyable about the evening besides the terrific novice audience, who ate and drank throughout the performance, got up and left their seats when they felt like it, took lots of flash pictures, and shouted “Oi!” rather than “bravo” to show approval. That was the super-duper technology of the projection system. The sets were merely buildings with doors and sliding triangular panels. Projected onto them from hundreds of meters distant were beams of colored light that turned them into seemingly three-dimensional groups of pyramids, highly decorated temples, columns with groups of four 3-D portrait heads with middle-period Picasso noses, a sphinx whose scale altered convincingly, whole armies of stylized warriors and archers, vast walls of hieroglyphs, and scenes of African sculpture and fetishes that made you realize that the Ethiopian Aida and Amonasro are from a very different civilization than the Pharonic Egypt of Amneris and her father. Credit for the stage and visual direction goes to Paolo Micciche; projection design is credited to Watkinson/Corder; the set architect is Antonio Mastromattei; and the lighting designer Denis Guerette. Mr. Goldsmith’s organization achieved the goal of attracting a new audience to opera. This is not the new audience for the English National Opera’s performances in English (indeed, this was sung in Italian and the absence of surtitles was striking); or the new audience for the Royal Opera’s concert series at the Royal Festival Hall. This is a new Audience of opera virgins, and this should make a marketing opportunity for the established companies. For the distortions of the sound system at Earl’s Court mean that veterans of this production of “Aida” have, in truth, yet to hear their first opera.