Review: AIDA at the Kennedy Center's Opera House

The Washington National Opera began its 70th-anniversary season sumptuously Friday night with a musically dazzling, visually resplendent production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.

This is a handsome revival of WNO’s 2017 co-production with the San Francisco Opera, the Seattle Opera, and the Minnesota Opera. It was designed by the artist RETNA (born Marquis Lewis), who combines hieroglyphic, calligraphic, and graffiti elements into a marvelously mysterious, timeless environment bespeaking ancient gods and grudges. Vast slabs of gray are splashed with deep reds, purples, blues, and greens in set elements, props, and Anita Yavich’s costumes, which stylistically suggest early to mid-20th-century military wear for the men and a mashup of imperial eras for the women.

Director Francesca Zambello, the WNO’s artistic director, integrates the fantastic set into a marvelously vivacious grandeur. She plays with the larger-than-life proportions and the mixture of strong vertical and curvaceous lines provided by RETNA. This allows her to festively or dauntingly populate the stage during militaristic and celebratory scenes, including, of course, the famed grand march; to delicately focus on the principal characters of a love triangle as they wrestle with ardor and mixed loyalties under a fickle moon; and to harrowingly isolate those protagonists who eventually face their doom.

WNO casting alternates for the roles of the Ethiopian slave Aida, her rival and the Egyptian princess she serves, Amneris, and the warrior whom they both love, Radamès. On Friday, it was the superb trio of Jennifer Rowley as Aida, Raehann Bryce-Davis as Amneris, and Adam Smith as Radamès. The golden-voiced tenor Smith was compelling in his role’s soldierly resolve, his romantic certainty, and his steely, stubborn hopelessness. Mezzo-soprano Bryce-Davis reveled in her character’s cunning manipulations early on, and, while vocally wonderful throughout, shone most dazzlingly in her woeful fourth-act epiphanies, in which the full trenchant power of her arias was utterly disarming.

But Aida is the title and Aida is the star. Soprano Rowley did not disappoint. Here we have a musician with a luminous vocal instrument, a versatile and sensitive stage presence, wonderful timing (when Aida is startled, we are startled), a magical lyricism, and first-rate acting skills. We are lost and helpless with her in her devotion, her dreams, and her despair.

Shenyang, the bass-baritone who plays Aida’s father, the Ethiopian king, Amonasro, is persuasively, manipulatively threatening toward her. And Morris Robinson, the imposing bass who plays the high priest Ramfis, exudes, toward one and all, a veritable force field of implicit “don’t mess with me and don’t mess with the gods.”

The graceful solo dancers Dwayne Brown and Jenelle Figgins top an entirely winning WNO Corps of Dancers, adults and children, performing Jessica Lang’s choreography, which ranges from imperial to whimsical to acrobatic.

The Washington National Opera Orchestra and Chorus, under the bold,  confident, and precise baton of Kwamé Ryan, were magnificent. Verdi being Verdi, the brass blazed especially in fanfare and imperious pronouncement, and the winds wooed us with their mystically fluid spiritual sonorities. The freshness of the playing brought out the cosmopolitan innovation of Verdi’s score, still impressive a century and a half after the work’s Cairo premiere.

While there’s nothing funny about Aida, well, in fact there is, in the way that Antonio Ghislanzoni’s libretto, like most librettos, has inevitably and sometimes awkwardly aged. Rather than skittering by this fact, director Zambello wisely leans into it, highlighting, for instance, Radamès’s early unease around Amneris, and, to a lesser extent, Radamès’s cringe-inducing equivocation around whether he is in fact a traitor. (There was that spilling state secrets business, but it was all for love!)

Less deftly handled is Amneris’s perching overtop the ill-fated lovers’ tomb. I’m not sure just what blocking might work better there, but in a production that thrives on reimagining, perhaps it’s something to mull over.