(Photo: Marc Brenner/Royal Ballet & Opera)

Entombing doom in monochrome, director Robert Carsen’s 2022 production of “Aïda” buries its protagonists before they’re dead. Façades of forced conformity define it – popping through parades of khaki uniforms, authentic footage of exploding bombs and regimented training. A fictitious flag that features stars and stripes across red, white and blue confirm its commentary on the Western present day. Confined in its aesthetic, Carsen’s spectacle conveys a world in which its characters are pillaged of all agency; the personal is plural because nothing individual can exist.

Burying the Leads

Yet through this directorial dialogue a paradox emerges: a production highlighting the dangers of repression shrinks its players.

Abandoning the wondrousness of Ancient Egypt, Carsen opens this “Aïda” in a minimalist backdrop of stone walls resembling Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. A portrait of a president hangs in the center of this personality-less palace. Its motif of stars and stripes flags call to mind America but minus the excesses. Amneris, daughter of a pharaoh, spends three of the opera’s four acts clad in olive: luxury remains amiss.

When Radamès’s victory solicits dances in Act two, the audience is treated to a choreographed display of boot camp exercises such as army crawls. Projected on a wall behind are documented scenes of missiles firing, gasses leaking, tanks arriving and bombs thriving. As Daniel Oren led the orchestra through major-key festivities we watched events that led to real-life slaughter: visions purposely at odds with Verdi’s music. It was as though the work’s direction wanted to imply that Verdi couldn’t have composed a dismal harmony or counterpoint of horror to express disdain at the Egyptians; it resolved to fix this oversight.

Act three swapped the Temple of Isis for identical pews echoing the Anglican Church; the last one left Aïda and Radamès in a cellar stocked with missiles. This cocktail of explicit symbols voided the work’s universally understood barbarity to focus on condemning modern cruel bureaucracy. The message seemed to be that opera altogether is a pointless privilege, its characters’ acute aches aren’t worth visualizing and we ought instead to watch the news.

Over the Bombast

Reluctant to submit to such a concept, Daniel Oren whisked his listeners through soulful escapades on opening night. All woodwind solos loomed in ominousness to remind us of the central trio’s plights; a plangent flute’s vibrato teemed with somber tones to close “Celeste Aïda.” Brass’s raspiness served military celebrations with their sumptuous brusque rhythms.

While soldiers passed machine guns to each other at the end of Act one, Oren’s reverent harp pled with the warriors’ goddess in their prayer. Though horns occasionally succumbed to blowing raspberries, rich, thick vibrato in the lower strings warned of impending danger. With the Nile a no-go for this westernized conceit, the maestro tipped the strings’ vibrato into storminess to onomatopoeically depict “the eddies of the Nile” Aïda longs for in the third act.

Squeakiness peaked often in the high pitch of the heroine’s portrayer, soprano Anna Pirozzi. Confiding in captor (and rival) Amneris, “Per l’infelice patria, per me, per voi pavento,” the vocalist was hard-pressed to fulfil the high As of “pavento.” “Padre mio” in “Ritorna vincitor” made harsh false tones from their high E and C sharp. Performing in her middle range, Pirozzi was occasionally able to imbue her syllables with pathos: “vincitor dei mei fratelli” came out in a contemplative, slow diminuendo.

Yet the exigent opera’s pace was quick to overcome her feeble-bodied notes. “Che dissi?,” Aïda’s rhetorical question in “Ritorna vincitor,” emerged more in parlando than in song. Pirozzi often seized on portamento – such as one on “ah” before “Pietà, ti prenda del mio dolor,” her Act two duet with Amneris – in the service of ornamentation. These risks were inefficient. Skimpiness pinched many top notes; an alarming wobble tilted the first high F of “O patria mia” off pitch.

Accenting a fiercely throbbing tenor, Jorge de León stepped in to substitute for the previously announced Riccardo Massi in the role of Radamès. Radiance embraced the singer’s middle voice but this performance suffered from excessive forte moments – some of which trumped “pp” markings in the score. De León’s “Celeste Aïda” seemed to stress its “a” vowels in the “Aïda” and “divina,” loudly emphasizing not his heartache but their rhyme. The “pp” above “di luce e fior” went unnoticed and the tenor seemed to grow the last word by a syllable (“fior-or”).

Sometimes muffling consonants, de León aspirated some of “un trono vicino al sol” so that it sounded like “un trono vi-shi-no al shol.” Conversely, when Aïda offered her escape plan in Act three (“Fuggire”), the response was not the same infinitive but the command “Fuggite” with a “t”. “Gli dei m’ascoltano, tu mia sarai” came out almost a yell in the duet “Pur ti riveggo.”

Vocal Victors

Portentous trembling could be heard in the vivacious mezzo of Raehann Bryce-Davis: an imperious and penitent Amneris. Crushed by imminent defeat in love, Bryce-Davis’s Egyptian princess was a bounteous embodiment of passion and self-hate. The singer tested slave Aïda with the supercilious assurance, “Sanerà il tempo le angosce del tuo core,” in a combination of false sympathy and fear. Approaching enemies and comrades with her head held high, the vocalist’s Amneris scarcely failed to highlight her superiority. Bryce-Davis plumbed her low notes’ depth to show dismay and palpitation equally in “Pur rivelò di guerra l’alto segreto” in her defense of Radamès.

Certain moments came too close to gaudiness: when the deceitful princess tried to trick Aïda into thinking Radamès had died in Act 2 (“Cadde trafitto e morte”), Bryce-Davis overemphasized the final word; in contrast, her reflection “Morir mi sento” in the fourth act brought a quiet vulnerability. In moments of a subtle grace and less extreme dynamics she excelled, but the insertion of a glottal stop between the A flat and the B flat in “Radamès, qui venga” was an unfortunate cliché. Enriched by an emotive mezzo, Bryce-Davis can exert her natural gift with ease and should avoid old-fashioned choices.

Amartuvshin Enkhbat crafted mighty tones as Amonasro: King of Ethiopia and the enslaved Aïda’s father. Recollecting his late sovereign’s fate, Enkhbat manipulated weighty bass notes into vengefulness in the line “Giacque il Re da più colpi trafitto.” His authoritative rendering emboldened every word with an exceptionally sustained vibrato in an awesome instrument. Through a despotic prism Amonasro promised to Aïda, “Sposa felice a lui che amasti tanto, tripudii immensi ivi potrai gioir,” in intonations mixing solace with self-love. This apt juxtaposition incarnated the defeated leader’s contradictions.

George Andguladze’s King of Egypt struggled in his higher register: the phrase “Salvator della patria, io ti saluto” was abruptly cut off in the second act. His diction nonetheless was mostly crystalline.

Empowered by each chance to sing of urgent bloodlust or uproarious euphoria, the Royal Opera Chorus sang throughout the evening with immaculate dynamics and inimitable timing. Defying this production’s superimposed concept, Oren kept rubato ardent and exacting sometimes at his soloists’ expense: Pirozzi and her partner de León had trouble keeping up with their conductor’s tempi in “Pur ti riveggo.”

Carsen’s tokens from the recent past would find a better home in Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” where their bare sameness could evoke Stalinist Russia’s uniformity. Amidst this cohort of contrasting emblems, media and interpretations, the participants in this revival of “Aïda” were hard-pressed to capture its Romantic essence.