We love our opera
It will come as no surprise that we both take every opportunity we can to see an opera. We’re not too fussed about how/where we see it, either. During Covid times, we watched an opera almost every afternoon on TV, making a list that eventually numbered well over a hundred!
We’ve seen quite a lot of opera recently, from a shop window in Ireland…
and in its unfinished state during rehearsal and recording in Marianske Lazne.
And whilst it’s lovely to see a Première, performed live as we did here in Arth, Switzerland, we are equally happy watching a familiar old favourite on the big screen, live from the Met on a Saturday evening in our local cinema with friends.
We booked our tickets for last evening’s Aida a couple of weeks ago, agreed who was bringing wine, coffee, savoury snacks, chocolates etc and settled into our seats in Cineworld Cheltenham for a 5.30pm start.
Now, the last time we saw Aida was in Berlin in 2016 when the performance really blew us away. I can’t say Verdi’s opera is my all time favourite, but I have fond memories of singing the Grand March when I was at school. Every year, we’d have a house music competition and each house would assemble a choir to sing a big chorus like this. Once each house choir had sung, then the whole school would sing it together and with a piece like the Grand March from Aida, the results were, as you can imagine, pretty memorable.
We watched the trailer and thought the design of the piece to be original, with the opening showing an archeologist researching a tomb and coming across figures from the story, who came to life as the set opened up in front of him. But generally speaking, the staging was fairly static and more of a series of tableaus: quite understandable when something is set on such a grand scale as this.
All the set pieces were there for sure, though whether it was the cinema sound system that wasn’t quite up to scratch last evening or something in the production, but we felt the “enormity of the sound” was somewhat lacking.
There was, however, one standout piece that we all loved! The dance section of the Grand March was outstanding, we thought, and since it comes right before the interval, it was the “wow” that was on our minds and the topic of conversation during the break. Such energy, such original choreography and rhythm, it was quite remarkable, we all agreed. As we left the cinema later to walk back to the car park, it was that dance which was still on our minds and I hoped that once home, I’d be able to find a video of it, because I felt sure I’d soon forget how magnificent it had been.
Thankfully, I soon found it, initially on the MetOpera’s Facebook page, where the comments were utterly brutal! It seems like we might have been one of the few who had actually appreciated the choreography or the way in which the troupe performed it. Each to their own, eh? (At least, no-one left half way through!)
During every one of those scenes involving a cast of thousands, however, we were both peering at the faces, wondering if Pam, the “non-singing extra” we met on one of our recent cruises might have been in there somewhere? How wonderful to be dressed in one of those spectacular costumes in the midst of such a production! We can but imagine…
Just another reason to love a night at the opera!
