Washington Classical Review

Jennifer Rowley and Adam Smith star in Washington National Opera’s Aida at the Kennedy Center Friday night. Photo: Scott Suchman

Washington National Opera is celebrating its 70th anniversary season on an upbeat. As announced last spring at the company’s annual gala, the Dallas Morse Coors Foundation made an extraordinary endowment gift of $8.6 million to WNO when the foundation closed its doors. In response WNO has pledged to dedicate a “standard repertory opera production” each season to the memory of Dallas Morse Coors. Let lovers of grand opera rejoice.

This production of Verdi’s Aida fit the occasion for the most part. Seen at its opening Friday night in the Kennedy Center Opera House, Verdi’s late masterpiece featured some excellent casting and plenty of colorful pageantry and dance, if not necessarily true to the opera’s original Egyptian setting.

Jennifer Rowley made a solid company debut in the title role. The American soprano had a number of triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere toward the end of the last decade. Her voice still has a vivid soft side, heard especially in the “Numi, pietà” section of “Ritorna vincitor,” but the top range did not blossom as fully, allowing her to be engulfed by the orchestra and chorus at some of the climaxes. Her acting, relying on repeated stock gestures, did not pull at the heart-strings either.

The triumph of the cast was Adam Smith’s heroic Radamès, the Egyptian warrior who falls in love with Aida, the enslaved foreign princess. The English tenor, as with his WNO debut in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, displayed a forceful top range. Although he could mollify the tone to produce shimmering piano sounds, he did not do so at the end of “Celeste Aida,” for example, where Verdi so carefully insisted on a contained dynamic, even marking the vocal line “pppp” at one point. Smith insisted on hitting those concluding high notes at full volume.

Raehann Bryce-Davis had a mixed night as Amneris, the Egyptian princess in love with Radamès and fatally jealous of Aida. The American mezzo’s broad vocal range featured some searing power at the bottom and top, but toward the middle her dark-hued, smoky tone color often felt covered, insufficient for the character’s angry outbursts and sometimes skewing off-pitch. Bass-baritone Shenyang, returning to the WNO stage after a decade’s absence, brought robust vocal power and dignity to Amonasro, Aida’s defiant and royal father.

Company favorite Morris Robinson reprised his turn as the vengeful high priest, Ramfis, from the last time WNO mounted this production, in 2017, with spite-filled potency throughout his range. Another WNO regular, bass-baritone Kevin Short, did not quite equal Robinson in presence but brought gravitas to the Egyptian king. Two singers from the Cafritz Young Artist program made notable appearances: silvery-voiced soprano Lauren Carroll as the off-stage Priestess and earnest tenor Nicholas Huff as the frightened Messenger.

Kwamé Ryan, who had a laudable WNO debut in Porgy and Bess last season, proved less able to keep this more complex score on track. Singers often darted ahead of the orchestra, to which the conductor’s gesture seemed to get more frantic in response. The ensemble never went entirely off the rails, but Verdi’s score seemed unsettled dramatically as a result. The violins proved the only weak link in the orchestra, with some intonation disagreements, particularly in the delicate introduction to Act I. The four onstage trumpets, three of whom also play in U.S. military bands, gave a gleaming edge to the famous triumphal march.

Photo: Scott Suchman

WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello was tempted to politicize Aida in this grim production, which debuted at Glimmerglass in 2012. This production, seen at Lyric Opera of Chicago and other companies in recent years, begins in the same place, with the Egyptians in 20th-century military uniforms and their king attired like former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. References to Aida and her father as Ethiopian are simply omitted from the supertitle translations: The costuming for Amonasro suggested another dictatorship like China or North Korea (design by Anita Yavich).

Once the staging left the ugly military barracks of the opening scene, Michael Yeargan’s sets became much more colorful and grand. Graffiti artist RETNA created calligraphic decoration for the production that lies somewhere between hieroglyphics, Asian lettering, and urban tags, often illuminated in bright colors (lighting revived by Peter W. Mitchell). The ballets, choreographed nobly by Jessica Lang featured a group of male dancers, with one of them, Dwayne Brown, partnering the elegant Jenelle Figgins, costumed in godly gold, as principals.

A group of acrobat-trained child dancers, costumed like pint-sized Saddam Husseins, distracted regularly with their antics. These child-soldier Polichinelles seemed more reminiscent of a misconceived Nutcracker than part of a tragic opera. Zambello has stated publicly that WNO ticket sales are down by about 38% this season, with a noteworthy decline in donations to the company as well. Hopefully the draw of one of Verdi’s greatest scores, even in this uneven staging, can reverse the trend.

Aida runs through November 2, with an alternate cast slated for October 25 and 30 and November 2. kennedy-center.org

Child dancers in Washington National Opera’s Aida. Photo: Scott Suchman