Glorious singing in a transformative Aida at London’s Royal Opera House

The 1953 Coronation opera season is famous for bringing Maria Callas to Covent Garden in three roles (one of them the title role in Verdi’s Aida) and for the world premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, a work whose lasting virtues were wrong for that year. London’s two main operatic events of the 2023 Coronation weekend were considerably less splendid and historic — and were chalk and cheese in idiom — but each joined politics and music effectively.

The current Royal Opera House production of Aida often seems anti-Aida. Robert Carsen’s production, new in September 2022, is an antidote for those who know Verdi’s 1871 classic in terms of colossal stage architecture and for glamorous spectacle. This staging presents ancient Egypt as modern-dress military state. Greys and beiges dominate the palette.

Carsen has fine-tuned his production for a second cast of international singers, conducted by Mark Elder. Even though flaws remain — why, for the finale, is the military hero Radamès locked in a missile store? — the result is transformative.

It now lives from within, principally because of the performances by American soprano Angel Blue (making her role debut as Aida) and South Korean tenor Seokjong Baek. Both of them make much more of their words than did Elena Stikhina and Francesco Meli in September, with acting more physically vivid. Blue’s voice has bloom and sailing power throughout its range. Though she may still acquire more detail and intensity, she’s already an impressive incumbent of this taxing role. As a heroic tenor who uses his eyes well, Baek is already a rarity; his Italian diction gives new life to even incidental words (“dirti” — “to say to you” — leapt out with real feeling in his opening recitative); his singing combines sweetness with strength.

As Amneris, Latvian mezzo soprano Elīna Garanča reaches yet another peak in her glorious career. She has vocal and physical glamour, incisive power, telling verbal utterance, convincing anguish. Since Covent Garden’s 1977 revival, my yardstick for this role has been Fiorenza Cossotto; now Garanča gives me another. Elder’s conducting was propulsive, marvellously breathing conviction into Carsen’s bleak vision of a militarised nation in which religion and arms work together.

★★★★★ 

The good and bad sides of Abomination: A DUP Opera are both striking and obvious. It begins with speech, in which we all hear the words, but soon moves into singing, where the words are often unintelligible, even though the performers are miked. Composer and director Conor Mitchell compounds this problem with his orchestration, where brass and percussion often drown diction. Yet very soon we hear enough words — and see enough action — to be caught up in a complex drama.

Yes, this DUP is the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, the word “abomination” taken from an infamous 2008 radio interview in which then DUP member of parliament Iris Robinson used it to denounce homosexuality. And yes, this is the same Iris Robinson who, it later emerged (as shown here), had been having an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old even while comparing homosexuality to the sexual abuse of children.

There is no linear narrative in Abomination. Instead, it is opera as fragmented psychodrama, where bigotry, religion, politics, journalism and gay rights campaigning all coexist — occasionally as a Babel where unintelligibility becomes the point, sometimes as a portrait of hypocrisy, generally as a demonstration of human complexity. The production is carried, brilliantly, by the soprano Rebecca Caine. Her Robinson combines burningly neurotic conviction with riveting vulnerability.

★★★☆☆

‘Aida’ to June 1, roh.org.uk

‘Abomination’ will be performed at Brighton Festival on May 9 and 10, brightonfestival.org