photos:Sherif Sonbol

Bye-bye Budapest, hello Aida

By David Blake

Laying it on for one's friends with celebrations can be perilous. Some are straight line like weddings or engagements -- or anniversaries which are a bore.

Then there's "the other thing". But funerals can be fun, especially if they are royal. Take-ons, like the one given on 10 October at the Cairo Opera House, are problematic. You can't please everyone even at a birthday party.

The first half of this concert was gala enough. Every effort was made to drive home the happy days, the nights of art and pleasure. Beethoven's strange, quirky Fantasy in C minor for piano, choir and orchestra was brash and dazzling enough for any happy birthday.

The orchestra under conductor Mostafa Nagui hurled themselves into it. The piano solo opens it, and Ramzi Yassa came in strong and forceful. When the bouncy tune which settles the whole show into the party mood began, both conductor and player let rip. Letting rip with speed at the opera is the fashion these days. Don't hesitate, slice in with everything you've got and as quick as possible because time... Let's not say it. This approach is exciting anyway and is a good sign. Just watch out if you are a singer or a pianist.

Yassa knows all about that particular aspect of the piano and he played with startling vigour. He was there to show he's still here as a player and don't you forget it.

Beethoven doesn't often skip but he did move, and in this version of the work he put on roller skates and went off through Cairo city streets, one leg at a time on the corner turns. It sounds as though Mustafa Nagui needs no encouragement to the speedo approach to this sort of music. He positively blazed up to the finale with the help of the celebrated Budapest State Opera Choir, that of the wonderful, soaring spicy sopranos. Their part in the 9th symphony, which was to follow the intermission, was eagerly awaited.

And so it had come again. Rather like Aida, the 9th symphony of Beethoven makes occasions -- at least on this side of the moon it does. What happens on the other side can only be imagined but it cannot be stranger than what happened on this side as El-Saedi began his version of the 9th.

El-Saedi is much valued. He can pull out of the hat miracles at times -- his Dracula music and Mahler. But where were we in this version of the Beethoven? Which side of the moon? Not Beethoven's. No moon either and no Beethoven. A sort of rapidly disintegrating meteorite, the symphony was grumpy, nervous, stressed and chopped up into small square pieces.

No joke. And it was once said by a Viennese, "you can conduct the entire 9th symphony easier than play a few phrases of Beethoven properly on the piano." Where was Schiller and the ode and the celebratory joys?

This was a birthday concert: some birthday when Beethoven sounds to have peripatetic epilepsy. The design, if that's the name for it, of the 9th symphony is flow. Everything is flowing into something else -- great or small, tributaries or main stream, where they are inexorably led to the final peroration. And there's no doubt about the route, pattern or style needed.

We had, instead, Beethoven nutty, trying to get out of somewhere, a room. It took El-Saedi nearly the entire four movements to liberate Beethoven even a little bit from his box prison. Whatever his strong points, his conducting of vocal music is positively percussive. He will simply not permit a voice to flow and flood to its climactic moment. He clips the blossom before it flowers. Unfortunately he clipped the wonderful Budapest Opera Choir in this way.

And then came what should have been the final uplift. The choir, so rich in sopranos, were disconnected from the music like a light switch. And so passed the 9th symphony, the splendour of an entire musical civilisation, to a squib. Bye-bye Budapest, you did your best. For sweet friends of this opera house, bless this lovely house and hope Beethoven wasn't listening.

Aida; Cairo Opera Orchestra; Cairo Opera Ballet; Cairo Opera Choir, Aldo Magnato, choir master; Patrick Fournillier, conductor; Abdel-Moneim Kamel, director; Giza Pyramids, 12 October

Hell of a good idea, Aida. Shove you high up on Pyramid Heights, Cairo, near where the nightclubs used to be, high-dress you up in Hollywood 1930s clothes -- and so was born the Aida Follies of 1998. It looks as though it cost millions.

Follies means big. And plenty. If they say we want 30 virgin priestesses, why not throw up 200? It looks better. This was old in Cecil B. de Mille days. It's older now, but still works on an audience. You're having a great time, friend, look at what we're spending on you. It's an audience put-down that lasts through the show.

Thinking big is great. To think big you need more than money; you've got to be mad, like the creators of great movies and multi-media shows. You need the authentic crazy banana stuffing to be a professional big thinker.

Up at the Pyramids they had the right idea for this particular Aida, but somewhere along the line, somehow someone got cold feet. So the 1998 Follies is big but there are not enough mad ideas in it to really set it alight.

Look at this opera from Aida's point of view. She's no longer an opera, she's nothing to do with music. She's in big business, coloured advertisement, Aida clean-up fluid for face and floor. She's not anything else. She has been marketed into something disturbing. She dominates the Egyptian opera scene like a vampire queen. She gets all the space, the money and the hype. Aida has become a poltergeist doppleganger, sucking the id out of Egyptian musical theatre. Not an opera at all.

She has become a big annual outdoors blow up whose presence smothers almost everything else. She has become a catachresis for opera itself -- operaida. The Aida phenomenon has nothing to do with Egypt. As she is now, she is a sort of figure out of the personality magazines, nothing to do with music, or the history of Egypt as it is today. Egypt does not own her, the Milanese music publishing house of Ricordi does. And they take very good and careful care of her drawing power with a vast public who never go to any other opera.

The real opera Aida came out here in Egypt in 1871 and five years later, in 1876 at Bayreuth, Wagner's Ring was first performed, an event which disturbed Verdi profoundly. Aida was intended for the world and not Egypt alone. This is how it really is now. One look at the Baldini portrait of Verdi -- his eyes, the immense superstructure of the upper head -- show a raging bull of a man. To him Memphis was just another old tomb town. He was interested first in his work as historical phenomenon. His care over Aida shows clearly how he felt about it. Detailed, finely structured, with a genius for concision unique in music.

And what has Aida become now? A Holiday on Ice without the ice. It is dragged around from Luxor to the Pyramids, mounted regardless of the comfort of an audience still under the spell of Superstar Aida, an audience who will put up with anything.

Her latest manifestation at Giza Heights has about as much to do with Verdi's opera as Snow White. But it has turned out to be a comfortable, good-natured and well put together fairy tale. Every care has been taken not to send it up too far. Patrick Fournillier, the conductor, gave exact and deeply felt attention to the score. So it was in good hands.

Its big cast cannot be bettered anywhere in the world today. On 12 October Vladimir Galouzine showed complete understanding of the Radames role. He is a tremendous force in opera. Such a voice and beauty and sympathy make him the best tenor of today. Maria Guleghina as Aida is better than machines allowed her to be. For the Teresa Stolz high soprano areas she was right and elemental. The rest of the voice seemed there but out of touch with the machine contacts.

Bruna Baglioni does not have enough big power for Amneris but under Fournillier's supportive help she was the real Verdi heroine of the evening. Amonasro, performed by Bernd Weikl, was a joy -- powerful, but not a noisy old ruffian. Everyone, including Tamer Tewfik as messenger and Gihan Fayed as a splendid forceful priestess belonged in this team of splendid singers.

The orchestra and chorus were well into the picture of Fournillier's extremely fine-fingered Verdi. And what a pleasure it was to hear it. Decor was endless, spacious and swallowing. The costumes belonged in this strange outdoor open world like things from the Fab Land Follies of fun, fresh and free. The singers enjoyed them. Everything floated around, yards of cloth of gold and pale moon colours contrasting. It looked very beautiful.

Why then the feeling of vacuum? Space. Opera is not for vast distances. Even the singers' voices do not come from their bodies as they breathe. They reach you instead already depersonalised by material machines. The voices are made, therefore; not exactly operatic performance; there is no contact. This is not the singers' fault. You cannot see the faces. You receive everything distance-wrapped.

Some things of the evening belonged on a human level. Like Reda El-Wakil, bass, and his High Priest Ramphis. His walk across the endless stage after condemning the hero Radames to death was absolute theatre. We knew who the ruler of the empire really was. He and another of his victims, Amneris performed by Baglioni, made the fourth act the hub, as it should be, of this long haul Aida.

Bernd Weikl as Amonasro was a perfect Verdian father. His Bayreuth sense of the importance of words made sympathy flow when he rejects his daughter with the words "then be a slave all your life." Galouzine's repeated singing of the single word "Aida" in the final tomb scene was so beautifully dark and pure one might go a lifetime and not hear its equal.

So the Follies phenomenon is not because of the singers but because of the super open air approach to opera.

Back home in town is one of the most beautiful, generous, giving opera houses in the world -- the Cairo Opera House. A devoted lover of the place would resent that experimental Aidas are not done where they truly belong -- in a theatre.

In the meantime Aida floats her fairy way over Giza Heights. It's a show to see, but take strong army boots, take water, take hope and take a cushion on which to sit because the seats make those of the Bayreuth Festival sybaritic luxury.

Related:

Meeting a myth

Aida returns to the Pyramids

Sympathy symphony