NEW YORK — “O terra, addio,” the doomed lovers sing at the end of Verdi’s “Aida,” bidding the earth adieu. Now, after 31 years and 251 performances, the time has come for the Metropolitan Opera’s sprawling, sturdy, utterly traditional, utterly delightful “Aida” production to join them in farewell.
The well-worn, well-loved show will play just twice more, on March 4 and 7 (numbers 252 and 253). Then its weathered hieroglyphics, its applause-garnering live horses, its looming walls of craggy stone-esque plaster and its gold-sprayed props will all be sealed in storage, as securely as Aida and Radamès in their tomb at the opera’s end.
Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, confirmed in an interview that when “Aida” returns, it will be to open the 2020-21 season in a new production directed by Michael Mayer and designed by Christine Jones, the pair that updated the Met’s “Rigoletto” to 1960s Las Vegas. Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct a starry cast: Anna Netrebko, Anita Rachvelishvili, Piotr Beczala and Ludovic Tézier.
“It will be as epic and grand as the current production,” Gelb said, “in a completely different way.” (It will also eliminate one of the current staging’s two intermissions.)
Perhaps it’s not fashionable for a critic, especially one with a taste for the progressive in opera, to cop to loving the Met’s “Aida,” which was originally mounted in 1988 in majestic Franco Zeffirelli-ish style by Sonja Frisell, who got the gig after Zeffirelli’s own concept proved impossibly expensive, even for the go-go ‘80s.
But I love it.
I love the shadow-strewn scene on which the curtain rises during the soft final bars of the prelude. I love how Amneris’ attendants hilariously pretend to play the harp in the second act, and how one of them does a wonderfully unnecessary show of presenting perfumes for her to sample. I love how opera can sometimes be about what’s unnecessary, about what’s extravagant, fun, sensorily stimulating.
I love when the stage slowly lowers to reveal the sun-baked Triumphal Scene. I love how the extras circle back into the parade again and again in different costumes, trying to convince us that this really is a cast of thousands. I love the flickering torchlight emanating from the chamber where the priests judge Radamès.
Will the new production be better? Maybe. It will almost certainly be less hulking. But the departing, bulky, stage-filling simulacrum of ancient Egypt deserves an elegy for showing up, season after season, and finding the balance on which 19th-century grand opera relies: between awesome spectacle and intimate drama.
It’s being put to bed honorably, with a cast that sings well and commits itself to the drama. Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky is for once an Aida who seems like the princess she is, proud and forthright. Radvanovsky has calmed a voice that used to have starker edges, though her tone is still chalky.
With his haunting, echoey baritone, Quinn Kelsey is an unusually sinister Amonasro. As Radamès, tenor Jorge de León is blunt but sincere and charming — much like the production. And while commanding bass Soloman Howard is always a pleasure as the King, will the Met ever give him another role?
The best surprise is mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova, who, after a handful of minor roles with the company, delivers a thrilling Amneris. Her voice has less plummy power than Rachvelishvili’s, but it penetrates, without ever losing its gentleness of texture. And she deploys it with delicacy and feeling through the full range of the character’s moods. Rarely have I seen an Amneris so plausibly lovelorn, so earnestly pained.
When this production had its premiere on Dec. 8, 1988, the Radamès was Plácido Domingo. In a memorable bit of poetic symmetry, he returns for these final performances, this time on the podium, helping the great ocean liner sail one last time.
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‘Aida’: March 4 and 7 at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.