[Met Performance] CID:295000



Aida
Metropolitan Opera House, Tue, January 3, 1989




Aida (931)
Giuseppe Verdi | Antonio Ghislanzoni
Aida
Aprile Millo

Radamès
Plácido Domingo

Amneris
Stefania Toczyska

Amonasro
Sherrill Milnes

Ramfis
Paul Plishka

King
Dimitri Kavrakos

Messenger
Charles Anthony

Priestess
Sarah Reese

Dance
Naomi Marritt

Dance
Antoinette Peloso


Conductor
James Levine







Review 1:

Review of Martin Mayer in Opera

The other new production of mid-season was "Aida," replacing a bargain-basement John Dexter 1970s version with styrofoam animals (but with a very concentrated Judgment Scene that held the attention of the audience at an angle made at the front of the stage). The original thought had been to revive the collaboration of Leonard Bernstein and Franco Zeffirelli that gave us our wonderful 1960s Falstaff, but Bernstein chose to celebrate his 70th birthday elsewhere and Zeffirelli's designs would have doubled the national debt. After a roster of conductors had begged off what was, after all, a minimum engagement of eight weeks, Levine undertook it himself.

Sonja Frisell directed, to massive effect in a super triumphal march, creating also the most beautiful last scene I have ever seen by using both levels of the stage at once, a dumb show in the temple accompanying the ethereal farewells of the lovers below. Gianni Quaranta gave us handsome and serviceable sets, the big toe of the statue roughly the size of Radames's head; an observer with only marginal vision would easily know it was Egypt. Neither the Nile scene nor the Judgment scene worked very well, the first because the stage was dominated by a temple with a brightly lit doorway stage right, in which Amneris incomprehensibly stood a while to observe the conspirators among the papier-mâché rocks stage left, and the latter because there was too much marching back and forth.

I saw the second cast on January 3, preferring Aprile Millo and Stefania Toczyska (who sang the broadcast and will appear in it on [the first] night next season) to Leona Mitchell and Fiorenza Cossotto (who sang the prima). Placido Domingo, Sherrill Milnes and Paul Plishka (an outstanding Ramfis) remained to sing with the new ladies. Millo, who is legitimately the great hope of the house, was tense and suffered occasional wobbles on her first night in the part, but even then she sang the last scene to absolutely the highest historical standards-and in the broadcast the following Saturday she was exquisite throughout. Toczyska was a worthy rival, handsome, with a strong, accurate, almost vibrationless mezzo. As she increases her mastery of the style, she will be a great asset around here, for I gather the Met has had the foresight to sign her up for long periods.

Domingo was there, standing where he was told to stand and singing well, with zero involvement. Milnes, having given up efforts to dominate the house, sang on a smaller scale than his wont, but with much more of that old honeyed tone than we had been hearing of late. The show sold out ("Aida" always does), people liked it, and the Met doesn't have to think too much about "Aida" for a while.

Review 2:

Andrew Porter in the New Yorker

The Met's new "Aida" was a dull, undramatic affair. Placido Domingo, the Radamès, made one sit up at times, attentive to noble, bravely voiced phrases—to great singing—in duets with Aida and with Amneris. Leona Mitchell, the Aida, produced rich-velvet sound. She had evidently worked hard to get the role into her voice, but as an interpreter she was tame. Fiorenza Cossotto, the Amneris who made her debut some thirty years ago and her Met debut, as Amneris, twenty-one years ago, and who has never hesitated to push her voice to its limits — was still loud, but her timbre was strident and disagreeable. Sherrill Milnes was an impressive Amonasro, with stage presence and forceful phrasing; he made sense of the words. James Levine's conducting began well, with a supple, meticulously phrased, beautifully played prelude. But he lacks Verdian naturalness. As the evening progressed, he seemed often to get in the way of the music, now pushing, now dragging.


Sonja Frisell's stage direction is the merest blocking. Gianni Quaranta's fairly standard decor and Dada Saligeri's costumes make pictures of white and gold against sandstone, with a touch of color provided by Amneris' green fan; Aida and Radamès gain colored costumes in Act III. The Met stage lifts come into play in Act II, when Amneris' boudoir sinks to reveal a triumph scene behind (and the audience applauds loudly), and again in Act IV, when the temple floor rises to reveal the dungeon beneath. A new production by Franco Zeffirelli had been planned, but it was abandoned, as being too costly. Why those who run the Met, with the world to choose from, should then have settled on this dowdy, undistinguished staging (derived from a Rio de Janeiro production) is a mystery. If they wanted an old-fashioned, non-dynamic, routine "Aida," they might have re-created the painted-canvas decor of the 1908 Met production, which looks handsome in photographs; or of the amply documented Scala première, of 1872, which Verdi supervised; or of the famous 1880 Opéra production, when Verdi at last won the unqualified Paris triumph that had for so long eluded him. Any of those would at least have historical interest — as a kind of scenic analogue of an authentic-instrument performance.


The Met has been getting a bad press this season, especially for its casting. After a "Barbiere" revival, the Times suggested that the management would have done better to call out on the Broadway sidewalk "Any Rossini tenors around?" than to import the Almaviva it did, since at any hour it would be sure to find at least three passing Americans more talented. On the other hand, "Sold Out" stickers appear on placard after placard outside the opera house. In 1952, Virgil Thomson, who had been the Herald Tribune critic for twelve years, declared that the Met was "not a part of New York's intellectual life." In Gatti-Casazza's day, I think, it probably was. The annals suggest it. GattiCasazza was keen in pursuit of new works from the world's leading composers. We wait now to learn who the Met's next general manager, successor to Bruce Crawford, will be. He or she faces an impossible task. The company has locked itself into a routine of shoveling on seven grand-opera performances a week in a disastrously large house, inimical to dramatic immediacy, in a jet-flight age when good singers and conductors don't settle in New York for the whole season. There is competition for them from American regional companies that did not exist in Gatti-Casazza's day: towns that once enjoyed Met and Chicago tours, with starry international casts, now have their local companies, many of which offer higher fees than the Met can afford. Meanwhile, European houses that once had stable home companies — Paris, Munich, Hamburg — go star- seeking, too, offering high fees; and that makes the Met's life harder still. It's a mess. Easy to grow cynical: to wish the Met well in purveying third- rate tourist entertainment so that — albeit at vast expense, with millions in the form of private and (through tax deductions) public subsidy — a New York grand-opera machine survives able to mount a few things that do matter, like the forthcoming "Ring."


"Aida" is the opera the Met has done most often. ("La Bohème" comes next, then "Carmen.") Since 1886, it has been heard most seasons. The first night of the new production was billed as the company's six-hundred-and-fifty-second performance, and that figure does not include two hundred and sixty-four on tour. The latest release in the series Great Operas at the Met is "Aida." On two compact disks, it includes clutches of recordings from 1908 to 1930 and from 1952 to 1974. The earliest track is Caruso's 1908 "Celeste Aida," and the latest an Act II duet by Montserrat Caballé and Cossotto, from 1974. The very first Met performers — Therese Herbert- Forster (Victor Herbert's wife) as Aida, Marianne Brandt (one of Wagner's Kundrys) as Amneris — left no records. They sang the opera in German; from 1884 to 1891, all Met operas were sung in German. And Lilli Lehmann, the Met's first Aida in Italian, recorded nothing from the opera. The album — depending on one's beliefs, this can be either disconcerting or reassuring — affords no consistent evidence that "Aida" was once better interpreted than it is today. Caruso's "Celeste Aida," though splendidly voiced, is bluntly uttered. Claudia Muzio's "Ritorna vincitor," though urgent, lacks breadth of phrasing. Caballé, like Celestina Boninsegna (in a 1909 "O patria mia"), floats magical high notes, but she is rhythmically inert. Zinka Milanov is splendid in many ways, but her flustered interjections in the Nile duet with Amonasro sound almost comic. Birgit Nilsson in the final duet is delicate. (Not surprisingly so: her "Salome" recording is delicate, too. It was a coarse public that valued most the power she commanded.) But among the Aidas only Johanna Gadski (in 1913) and Rosa Ponselle (in 1926) merit praise well-nigh unqualified. Among the Amnerises one hears true, solid contraltos in the early days — Louise Kirkby-Lunn, Louise Homer — instead of today's more emotional mezzos. There are fine tenors: Giacomo Lauri-Volpi fiery and forward, Giovanni Martinelli a model of noble declamation in the thirty-two B's that open the tomb scene, Jon Vickers heroic, Carlo Bergonzi lyrical. (It is odd to learn, from David Hamilton's program essay, that Jean de Reszke, Radamès to Lehmann's Aida, simply omitted "Celeste Aida," as being too taxing an aria that early in the evening.) Pasquale Amato and Giuseppe De Luca are notable Amonasros. What is evident is that voices were once better "composed" — evener through all the range, steadier, readier to strike notes dead center, more concerned with "flow" than with "push" and "force" than many of today's voices are. If "Aida" is not necessarily better interpreted here, except by a few of the singers, it is certainly better sung. That leads to difficult realms where vocal prowess must be balanced against dramatic communicativeness. Elisabeth Rethberg was obviously a more reliable singer than Maria Callas, but Callas was the most exciting Aida I have heard and seen. Mr. Domingo, by some of his singing, and Mr. Milnes, by his declamation, provided the only moments of excitement in the Met's latest "Aida."



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