Aida review – dour staging gains colour from the pit

There’s an enduring story that the premiere of Verdi’s Aida featured a dozen elephants in Act 2’s triumphal procession. Disappointingly that’s a myth, but there’s at least one of them still lurking in the room now whenever an opera company takes on the work, one that gets bigger and wrinklier with the years: how to stage today an “exotic” story of Egypt and Ethiopia, seen through 19th-century Italian eyes?

Robert Carsen’s solution is to take both nations out of the equation, and instead to set the story in a totalitarian state, somewhere, anywhere. The red and blue of its flag breaks up the grey and khaki colour scheme of Miriam Buether’s bunker-like set, populated with row upon row of smart soldiers – the men of the chorus, sounding terrific. It brings North Korea to mind, or perhaps Trump’s America, especially when Soloman Howard’s excellent Ramfis leads his men in pianissimo prayer as they sit, chapel-style, with their assault rifles – or indeed Russia, which would be prescient as Carsen conceived this Covid-delayed production back in 2018. Flag-draped coffins are borne offstage in the famous triumphal march before soldiers dance their story of the battle, choreographed by Rebecca Howell; as the scene reaches its choral culmination the stage is dominated by films of an intensifying series of explosions. This place doesn’t glorify war so much as feed off it.

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Does it work? Yes and no. Verdi wrote an opera that was to be full of spectacle, and if you take the visual oohs and ahhs away then there are stretches of music that no longer have much reason to be there, yet still need filling. That’s how come we have to watch the women painstakingly laying a table, and to wait while every single soldier salutes the returning Radames, one by one.

But on balance, it’s worth it. Francesco Meli’s golden-toned Radames warrants saluting even if we can sometimes hear the gear changes, and Elena Stikhina’s Aida packs considerable power behind her sweet-sounding soprano. Agnieszka Rehlis’s velvety mezzo-soprano doesn’t initially cut through the orchestra but catches fire in Amneris’s later scenes; here it’s the string sound Antonio Pappano draws from his orchestra that makes us trust in the sincerity of a character who has previously seemed villainous. If Verdi’s pacing sometimes goes askew on stage, it’s rock solid in the pit, Pappano and his players filling in all the colour that’s lacking on stage in this dour but truthful Aida.

Aida is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 12 October.