The overall playing space simply becomes smaller, and Carsen does the rest by replacing sprawling crowds with regimented choruses of close-ranked soldiers. That’s partly achieved by an optical narrowing of the walls towards the back. Miriam Buether’s stark, concrete sets pull off a neat trick in being both monumental and yet somehow intimate. Out go the camels out go two of the three ballets instead, we get an often-hushed world of sacred ceremonial and a ruthless militaristic leadership that uses symbolism and sacrifice for its own ends.įrancesco Meli (Radames) and Elena Stikhina (Aida) He has clearly thought long and hard about how to locate the personal within the political and his solution honours Verdi while speaking to a world of military parades and flag-draped coffins, all depressingly familiar to a contemporary audience. Add an incisive, insightful reading of the score by ROH Music Director Antonio Pappano, and this becomes a must-see when it makes its appearance on Australian cinema screens this November.Ĭarsen, according to a program note, sees his role as creating “a bridge between a work and its audience” in order “to rediscover the shock the opera had when it was first created”. Here is an Aida that seems to say exactly what Verdi would have wanted it to say. Thank heavens then for Robert Carsen’s new production for the Royal Opera House, a staging that is powerful and profound, grand and intimate, all at the same time. ![]() ![]() Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour’s 2015 gaudy update tried to score political points but wound up midway between Arab oil state and low-budget sci-fi. Highlighting more modern colonial elements may merely replace pharaonic chocolate box imagery with 19th-century bustles and fezzes. ![]() All photos © Tristram KentonĪttempts to bring the work up to date have been mixed.
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