Aida review – worth hearing, just shut your eyes | Music | The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/25/aida-review-worth-hearing-just-shut-your-eyes

Aida review – worth hearing, just shut your eyes

3 / 5 stars

Holland Park, London Daniel Slater's reimagined Aida is sinister and angry, but nothing to do with Verdi

A surreal study … Peter Auty, top, in Aida. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Tim Ashley

Thursday 25 June 2015 08.08 EDT Last modified on Thursday 25 June 2015 08.57 EDT

Daniel Slater's new production of Aida reimagines Verdi's Egyptian tragedy as a surreal study in plutocratic extremism. In a nod to the original setting, the opera is relocated to an antiquities museum, where a cocaine-fuelled, Wolf-of-Wall-Street-type fancy-dress party (Egyptian themed, of course) is going on to celebrate the opportunistic engagement of Peter Auty's uber-banker Radamès to Heather Shipp's rich-bitch Amneris. Radamès, however, only has the hots for Gweneth-Ann Jeffers's cleaning-lady Aida, one of a number of museum staff singled out for abuse, and possibly victims of human trafficking.

It's an angry concept that turns increasingly sinister, culminating in a literal manhunt that carries overtones of The Hunger Games or the Jean Claude van Damme thriller Hard Target. But it has absolutely nothing to do with Verdi, whose concerns were the ambivalent legacy of nationalism and the nature of theocracy. When Radamès contemplates the immense consequences of "abandoning my country", he pulls out his wallet and throws away his credit cards. The opera constitutes an attack on organised religion so hard-hitting that it could never have reached the stage in Verdi's lifetime had he set in in Europe: here, there's not a priest in sight, and the lone Priestess of Isis has become a cabaret vamp atop a statue of Anubis.

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Peter Auty and Heather Shipp in Aida Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

All this is a shame, because it sounds so good. Auty makes a terrific Radamès, sensitively characterised and heroically sung. Jeffers is pushed a bit in the Nile Scene, but registers Aida's conflicted emotions with remarkable vividness elsewhere. Shipp is utterly compelling, despite Slater's unsympathetic view of Amneris's character. There's fine conducting from Manilo Benzi, and top-flight singing from the Opera Holland Park Chorus. It's worth hearing. Just shut your eyes.

• At Holland Park, London, until 24 July. Box office: 0300-999 1000.