An Amped-Up ‘Aida’ at the Bowl

An opera as popular, as grand, as musically magnificent and as long-running as “Aida” is bound to have a history of indignities. And compared with, say, the sonically brutish, low-”Rent” “Aida” by Elton John on Broadway, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra treatment given Verdi’s score Sunday night practically counts as purist. Still, it took a bit of getting used to--and on both sides of the stage, I suspect.

John Mauceri, the conductor and mastermind of the concert performance, has made it his mission, according to his official program biography, to challenge the definition of what is considered “classical” (his quotes) in music. Usually that has implied bringing music from the Hollywood film and the Broadway musical into the canon, as he can be found doing most weekend nights during the Hollywood Bowl season.

But Sunday night, Mauceri--who, when not adding to his record as the conductor with the most Bowl performances, associates with opera companies--brought some of his pops salesmanship to the canon itself.

*

The most extreme example was the use of pops-style hot amplification on singers, orchestra, chorus--indiscriminately highlighting anyone or anything that made noise. Atmospheric lighting was designed to get the singers, stiff at their mike stands, off the theatrical hook. Blues and greens represented the Nile. Bold stripes of golds and purples illuminated the Triumphal March. A radioactive pink created an ominous night aura, the ratty shell bathed in carcinogenic glow. As Aida and Radames expired in their tomb, the lights flicked off, one by one.

Although these are conventions of pop stadium opera, there is something almost audience-unfriendly about them. The ugly, in-your-face amplification grated over time and exposed every small blemish in voice and instrument. Sung in Italian, without staging or surtitles, without text in the program (or light to read if it were there), the performance hardly seems the best introduction to opera, even though that was clearly one intention of bringing “Aida” out of the theater and onto the picnic grounds.

Mauceri, however, knows his audience, and it was fascinating to watch him turn obstacles to advantage, or at least bluster past them as if they were of little concern. He got the audience’s attention through his engaging (if occasionally smart-alecky) introduction of the plot before each act and then held it all evening long.

He conducted emphatically, as if each downbeat deserved equal weight. But that square determination had the practical benefit of keeping a large ensemble together throughout a long and complex opera that undoubtedly had been prepared with a fraction of the rehearsal time an opera company would give it. And even those lights--irritating in the twilight--ultimately created a mood in the dark as the long evening wore on.

Best of all, not Mauceri, not the microphone, not her size, nothing at all could keep Alessandra Marc down. She has an enormous voice and a wild side, and she has of late developed a dramatic confidence (and vocal control) that makes hearing her an enormous amount of fun. You are never quite sure what this dramatic soprano, like a singer of old, will do next, or quite how much volume she is holding in reserve for the next climax (there is always more than you expect, even when you expect quite a lot). Yet her Aida also has modern touch. She is not so much regal--the princess enslaved--as ferociously, impressively independent, feeling and acting as she will.

She was also surrounded by some strong singing. Rather than bring a cruel authority to Amneris, Catherine Keen offered something more interesting, that of a powerful princess deeply wounded. Donnie Ray Albert was an imperious and magnificent Amonasro, the captured Ethiopian king and Aida’s father; but surely his naturally powerful baritone didn’t need all that reverberation added to it.

*

After he warmed up, Richard Margison sang Radames with a heroic ring, although the amplification added a tinny phoniness to his otherwise commanding tenor. James Patterson was the King; Philip Skinner, Ramfis. The smaller roles, drawn from the membership of the Pacific Chorale, were not credited in the program--that space was turned over, instead, to logos of Bowl sponsors.

The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was not ideally refined, but no orchestra could have been with only a few rehearsals and bizarre amplification. Indeed, entrusting so much of the balance to the sound technicians, Mauceri gave up one of the conductor’s most cherished responsibilities.

At times it sounded as though the nobs were operated by chance, such as when an inner viola line overwhelmed violins, brass, chorus and soloists, producing an anarchic effect not unlike the abstract modern music Mauceri so militantly opposes. Even so, the orchestra seemed unfazed, its playing demonstrating an impressive overall competence. The engineers, however, were simply unkind in their intrusive scrutinizing of the Pacific Chorale.