Interestingly, the Amonasro-Aida relationship offers yet another glimpse at Verdi’s profound interest in father-daughter relations, this one full of conflicting motivations of love and patriotic loyalty. His Radames will never bear comparison with a Jon Vickers, a Luciano Pavarotti or a Plácido Domingo.īass Anthony Reed was a credible king of Egypt bass Raymond Aceto was an ominous High Priest Ramfis and baritone George Gagnidze was a powerful Amonasro, father of Aida and king of the invading Ethiopians. When he reached upward for high notes, Jagde sometimes hit pay dirt but at other times sounded a bit thin. In his Act I aria “Celeste Aida,” Jagde sounded almost like a baritone and this baritone coloration continued throughout Jagde’s portrayal of Radames.
Verdi wrote for tenors with a light color, and Jagde’s tenor is anything but light. While I can’t fault Jagde’s singing on technical grounds, it seems to me that his tenor voice is really not quite suited to the role of Radames. Particularly noteworthy was Semenchuk’s desperate Act IV dialogue with the dishonored Radames, in which Amneris pleads in vain with Radames to save his life if only he will abandon his love for Aida.Īs Radames, tenor Brian Jagde definitely took third place in this production, ceding pride of place to Crocetto and Semenchuk.
In the role of Amneris, daughter of Egypt’s pharaoh and a woman also in love with Radames, Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk gave a riveting performance, singing with great clarity, especially in Act IV. Leah Crocetto’s “O terra addio” as Aida joined Radames in death by entombment in Act IV was a thing of beauty. Her high notes were spectacular, delivered with conviction, and her lower register was full of dark tones that suggested her character’s inner turmoil as a prisoner of the Egyptians but a woman in love with Radames, who leads the Egyptians in battle against Aida’s own father, Amonasro, king of the Ethiopians. Leah Crocetto’s voice is a sumptuous soprano, redolent with rich color. Crocetto, who has never sounded better than here as Aida, also gave her very best dramatic performance thus far in her young career. With her sheer physical bulk, Crocetto’s Aida will never be the paragon of feminine beauty extolled by her lover Radames.
Director Francesca Zambello tried to make the best of this ill-conceived staging, and Zambello at least managed to inspire the notoriously statue-like Leah Crocetto to move around a bit and throw herself into a credibly dramatic interpretation of the role of Aida. In San Francisco Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Aida, which opened Saturday, November 5, two outstanding women singers, soprano Leah Crocetto as Aida and mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk as Amneris, overcame the drawbacks of a dismal staging by trendy Los Angeles-based artistic designer Marquis Duriel Lewis, who goes by the pseudonym Retna.
0 kommentar(er)
