For its “new” production of Aida this fall, the Paris Opera imported one from the 2017 Salzburg Festival, a choice that will have surprised many who saw it there. The production by the accomplished Iranian visual artist, photographer, and film director Shirin Neshat was created for a starry event: the soprano Anna Netrebko’s role debut as Aida in performances conducted by Riccardo Muti. Yet Neshat had no prior experience directing an opera. It was a baptism by fire for a woman of demonstrated talent in other areas. Understandably, film played a significant role in the production, specifically black-and-white footage of migrants, mainly women in somber dress near a sea. The sequences sometimes emerged as tentative and incidental to the opera’s drama. The production otherwise reflected Muti’s aversion to radical stagings, but this virtue was compromised by Neshat’s old-fashioned, stand-and-sing direction of the principals. Salzburg revived the production in 2022, reportedly with alterations.
The Paris Opera’s revival offered Neshat, a champion of women’s rights, an opportunity to express her interpretation more fully, and she took advantage of it. Parallels between the opera’s priests—decked out with flowing, ayatollah-style beards—and the hardline theocrats of her estranged country made the opera’s violence more pronounced. At the conclusion of the Triumphal Scene, the prisoners (men and women), having previously been ordered to strip, are mowed down by machine-gun fire. Gone is the scene’s senseless ballet in which bare-chested men appear in skirts. Neshat has also expanded the cinematic aspects and better integrated them into the action, graphically representing the debasement of women on a beach as another parallel between the opera’s Egyptians and the Iranian regime.
For the most part, however, the opera’s essential drama, as before, seems muted. The acting style has not changed much; likewise for the setting, which in Christian Schmidt’s designs resembles a giant Styrofoam box cut in two. Priests can thus occupy one half, the populace the other, thereby producing a kind of tableau vivant. In the scene of the consecration of the Egyptian warrior Radames’s weapons, golden clusters above the stage appear to illuminate the costumes of the chorus below to striking effect. Tatyana van Walsum’s essentially traditional costumes have flair. In a curious detail, a simple but clearly empowered soldier orders Amneris, the Egyptian king’s daughter, to put on a red gown, and she complies; thereafter, she wears a different dress for each act.
One attraction of the new Aida was Saioa Hernández, a Spanish soprano rarely seen in American productions, in the title role. Montserrat Caballé once hailed this compatriot as “the diva of our century.” But that was more than a decade ago, and the prophecy hasn’t come to pass. Still, her recordings and streamed appearances reveal a genuine Italianate dramatic soprano voice. Unfortunately, Hernández canceled the performance I attended (and the performance that was streamed as well) and was replaced by Ewa Płonka, scheduled for the second cast. She was a competent Aida, who sang accurately and without serious deficiencies, but her portrayal lacked arresting details and needed more personality.
The cast, however, did have some notable singers. The French mezzo-soprano Ève-Maud Hubeaux enjoys a major career in Europe but made her American debut only last year, as Carmen in San Francisco. She was an alluring Amneris, both vocally and visually—a more than credible rival of Aida for Radames’s love. Hubeaux has a bright, attractive voice without any heaviness; her low notes have body yet are nicely integrated with the registers above. Other singers have brought more power to the great Judgment Scene, but Hubeaux, retaining her femininity, was more than adequate vocally. Her voice remained enticing, even as she conveyed the character’s growing desperation.
Roman Burdenko’s cry as Amonasro of “Suo padre” upon entering—sung with both authority and tenderness in acknowledging his fatherhood of Aida—hinted at the accomplished portrayal that was to come. Those same two qualities characterized the Russian baritone’s memorable confrontation in the Nile Scene, sung in a warmly Italianate baritone as he persuades Aida to deceive Radames into revealing the plans of the Egyptian army. To date, his Metropolitan Opera career consists of four performances as Amonasro last season; one hopes for more.
Piotr Beczała, in sterling voice, repeated his justly celebrated Radames. His performance, it is fair to say, was geared more toward projecting the character’s heroism than to demonstrating the singer’s aptitude for nuance—no attempt at a pianissimo B flat in “Celeste Aida”—but there were exciting high notes, always gleaming and beautifully formed, along the way. Michele Mariotti, music director of the Rome Opera, was the vibrant conductor.
