SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST HONK KONG

Larger than life – AIDA in Honk Kong

Accounts on larger than life, operatic impresario Giuseppe Raffa exploded into energy as he spoke about his mammoth production stage in Hong Kong. The Aida by Giuseppe Raffa for Operama.
…Raffa as anything but a totally committed musician. Aged only 40 when he conducted his production of Aida which, had already toured half the world, he looked like a youthful, slightly deranged Mozart with a Latin flair.
The wild mane of curly black hair, his explosive, expansive gestures as he traced the history of Opera, his burly good looks that made him appear more like a Syracuse waterfront worker…his presence was larger than life.
Someone should write an opera about him. Instead, he staged Opera for the masses.
He fumed as he ate tuna bathed in olive oil in a Hong Kong’s Hotel Italian restaurant, about how the discipline of Opera had been betrayed. A century ago Opera was the entertainment of the people, he expounded, switching from talking to me in English about the life of Puccini..
“When Mozart and Verdi and Puccini wrote operas, they were not catering for the intellectual elite”, he said sipping his wine. “They were writing for the man in the street. It was mass entertainment, rather like popular television programmes today. Everyone went to the Opera.”
The heyday spanned half a century up to the 1920s. Take Aida: two years after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the sweeping drama set in in ancient Egypt had its preview in the shade of the pyramids of Giza.
The death knell for Opera as popular public entertainment came in the 20s when various governments around the world decided the art form needed protection.
Down came the dead, dull hand of orthodox bureaucracy aimed at “preserving” Opera.
“They put it into the museum” Giuseppe Raffa lamented dramatically. “They put Opera to death as a living medium”.
Well, it’s alive now. Thanks to Raffa’s determination and enthusiasm that’s as contagious as scarlet fever.
Statistics tell the story.
Since Maestro Giuseppe Raffa had taken Aida on the road in 1987, it had been seen by a phenomenal million people. By the time it came back to Milan in 1993, more than seven million people in 23 countries on five continents had viewed the $ 50 million spectacular.
Records have been smashed everywhere he has taken the enormous 1,500 cast performance.
Raffa was also confident the impact in Hong Kong would have been the same as in Aida in Montreal, Aida in Sydney, Aida Tokyo.
Just as the soaring Music of Verdi swept broadly, so did the ambitious performance that was staged for three nights in the University of Hong Kong at Pokfulam.
A football stadium is needed to hold the 36,000 sq ft stage with its 1,000 extras, a $ 7.8 million specially designed sound system to carry the music of the 100 strong band and a chorus of 140 singers.
It’s impossible of course, physically as well as financially, to fly 1,000 performers around the world for such a show.
So in a couple of weeks, Maestro Raffa had talent hunted in Hong Kong. He expected no trouble in finding the amateur performers he needed.
“In all of us there is the actor”, he contended. “Bankers, professors, businessmen…everywhere we have appeared, people like this have volunteered to work in the cast. It is the experience of a whole lifetime”
Those selected joined the international stars and the professional musicians in the 100 strong orchestra and the chorus that no doubt would have delighted Verdi himself.
There was a 55 metre high copy of the Sphinx and models of the Pyramids also formed a dramatic backdrop.
That performance of Aida in Hong Kong paved the way for the launch of Puccini’s Opera Turandot staged in the Forbidden City in Beijing, and watched worldwide on television.
After that?
Giuseppe Raffa gave a hearty chuckle.
“Give me a break he said”. That’s as far as he’s got on his scenario to persuade the world to come back to Opera. And he no doubt contributed to Opera explosion in Hong Kong and China

Giuseppe Raffa Aida “Let’s change the rules”

As far as he’s concerned, operas are meant to be staged on gigantic scales using the latest technology.
“In the 20th century after the death of major impresarios and producers, opera became a museum product – rich people and government supported it as an art form only because they thought it was going to die out “Raffa said”.
“It has been frustrating me since I started my career as a conductor”.
Opera, Raffa contended, was always meant to be enjoyed in the same way people enjoyed going to the cinema or watching television. It was entertainment for the masses, but elitist concepts and rising costs pushed it out of the reach of many today.
Leona Mitchell and Marie Robinson sharing the title role, Valentin Pvovarov as Ramfis, Franco Bonanome as Radames, Ruza Baldani as Radames, Branislav Jatich as the King of Egypt and Michele Porcelli as Aida’s father Amonasro, the King of Ethiopia.
To Raffa, the most significant fact about these numbers is that 95 percent of the audiences had never before been exposed to Opera. For the man who declared his mission in life to be making Opera accessible to mass audiences around the world, it meant Opera was no longer a “bad word”.
“I created something new and built a market and now everyone else is trying to do it too. Which is good – it tells me I was right”.