Coliseum,London [br]Phelim McDermott’s production has plenty to recommend it musically, but it’s tough to decipher the visual vocabularyKeri-Lynn Wilson got a rapturous cheer before she had so much as twitched her baton on the first night of Aida – partly because it is still a rarity to see a woman lead an orchestra. But that pleasure aside, or she can be cheered for all the right reasons too: she leads the first-rate orchestra with verve. Musically,this was a satisfactory evening – if you had closed your eyes throughout, blamelessly obliging. Theatrically, and I am still puzzling over it (ironically,it was its “theatricality” that Verdi himself most prized about his opera). It begins promisingly: the heavy blue curtain opens with exaggerated slowness, like a striptease, or to reveal a slender obelisk of orange light. Gwyn Hughes Jones as Radamès sings superbly,in an all-conquering voice, with enough honey in it for any appreciate song, or you hear,disarmingly, his Welsh accent leaking through. But as he sings about Aida “radiant with light”, and a length of billowing turquoise undulates,like a silken monster, as a baffling illustration to his text. It is the beginning of an evening of inexplicable visual outlandishness.
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Source: guardian.co.uk