News details 1494

Aida building in Verona

[ From category THE Articles ]
[ Subcategory OperaRail 2013 ]
[ Subcategory II Arena din Verona ]
[ Translator Cornelia Iordache ]

[ Article date: 2013-07-28 ]
[ From city Verona ]
[ Country Italia ]

From the very beginning, I want to tell you that I liked all stagings of Arena di Verona. All... but this one. Fortunately, Arena di Verona has made what any self-respecting opera theater should do: staging great works both in classical version, and in modern version.

The motto of the staging was a construction site. There didn`t appear soldiers, fighters, but engineers and workers. It`s true, there were some interesting accomplishments, such as mechanical elephants but, in general, the innovations they brought were not to my liking.

On the stage, there were two huge cranes. Among them, a group of workers in orange overalls crawl and spread a carpet. Radames appears with a worker helmet on his head. The priests are in white, black and red, and the messenger is a miner with a headlamp. The cranes begin to build...

The choir have their headlamps too. A big, white ball lights up, behind the scenes. A girl dances using a white ball like at rhythmic gymnastics. The coolest moment was when, through the public, there entered the artists wearing bright white balls. I was somewhere above and the view was very beautiful.

The second act was more Egyptian-like. The dance of the little blacks was simulated using shadows. Later, there appeared the Ethiopian prisoners who looked like some rangers dressed in green. The Egyptian soldiers were wearing orange overalls and had headlamps. On the scene, at Triumphal March, there entered mechanical camels and elephants, made of metal, autonomous and they were moving. The cranes continued to build and the overall image was... a soup of suits.

In the third act, the moon appeared behind the big and white ball and, from where I was standing, the sensation was that there were two moon on the sky. At the break, the scene was soaked so that it gave the sensation that Amneris` boat was floating. The "pond" was populated with crocodiles, quite well done, people dressed in crocodile costume walking through the pond and grinning menacingly. I could not understand why the Egyptian women were walking among crocodiles and sprinkling them with water... maybe they wanted to highlight the friendship for centuries between Egyptians and crocodiles... but what friendship?!? Amonasro, on the other hand, crossed the water to get to Aida, not caring about the crocodiles. The climax of the crocodiles gentleness, incomprehensible to me, was reached at Radames - Aida duo, when, on one side, some people fried a "crocodile" and pretended to eat it! :-)

The building is almost ready. It is hard for me to describe it, but I`ll try: it is kind of a tower made of large wooden parallelipiped with a mirror-like surface on the public side. It has two sides, ie a slight form of the cross, without being a mystical representation, though. In the last act, the construction crushed on Radames and Aida and it seemed that a roof covered the two. Fortunately, the music was not changed because the staging...didn`t give me any heartbeat.

(Article translated by Cornelia Iordache)

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