Verdi, Aida: Seattle Opera
By Bernard Jacobson
Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.
Verdi, Aida: Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Riccardo Frizza, dir. Robin Guarino, set designer Michael Yeargan, costume designer Peter J. Hall, lighting designer Robert Wierzel, choreographer Donald Byrd, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 2 and 3.8. 2008 (BJ)
How many opera-lovers, I wonder, can harbor even a faint suspicion that what they routinely hear at the end of Radamès’s “Celeste Aida” bears little resemblance to the way Verdi imagined the passage? “Pianissimo, morendo” (“very soft, dying away”) is the marking on the final high B-flat. Aware that he was asking a lot of his lead tenor, Verdi also provided a less taxing alternative, which brings the voice down an octave.
Almost everyone I have ever heard sing the role either takes that easier option, or belts out the high B-flat without any respect for the composer’s instructions. Not since the days of Carlo Bergonzi had anyone essayed a truly soft high conclusion in my hearing–till the opening night of the Seattle Opera season, which handily disposed of the fashionable notion that a “golden age of singing” can be located only in the past. Antonello Palombi had me momentarily worried, for, after starting the note quietly, he swelled it to a moderate mezzo forte, but then he fined it down to the most exquisitely floated pp, and held the audience spellbound with a long moment of rapt visual and aural stillness.
