Verdi - Aida, at the Paris Opera Bastille

ONP-Bastille, Wednesday October 22 2025

Conductor: Dmitry Matvienko. Production: Shirin Neshat. Sets: Christian Schmidt. Costumes: Tatyana van Walsum. Lighting: Felice Ross. Choreography: Dustin Kline. Aida: Ewa Płonka. Radames: Gregory Kunde. Amneris: Judit Kutasi. Amonasro: Roman Burdenko. Ramfis: Alexander Köpeczi. Il Re: Krzysztof Bączyk. Un messaggero: Manase Latu. Sacerdotessa: Margarita Polonskaya. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos (featuring first cast): Bernd Uhlig/ONP

When the Paris Opera staged Olivier Py’s production of Aida in 2013, it was their first since 1968, in one that dated back to 1939. Since then, they’ve made up for their omission. Py’s (to me, not as bad as people said) made it through just two seasons, until 2016. Lotte de Beer’s, with its luxury cast, in 2021, which I found quite entertaining though thousands didn’t, apparently succumbed to the pandemic. Now, in 2025, we have a revised ‘edition’, as she herself puts it, of Shirin Neshat’s 2017 Salzburg staging. I was still on holiday in Greece when it opened, but was back in time to catch the second cast.

For those who may not know, Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist living in exile in the USA. Her work, typically black-and-white photography or film, often centres on the resilience of people, women especially, faced with religious and political oppression. As she explains in interviews on the Paris Opera’s website, she relates to Aida because she herself is a woman living in a country whose ‘worst enemy’ is her own homeland, and lives in fear of its destruction by war.

She admits she knew nothing about directing opera when approached by Salzburg, and that, intimidated by its status and traditions, watered down her first staging (2017, revised in 2022). In 2025 (i.e. in the present revision), she says, ‘you will see a much more critical and raw version,’ giving heightened visibility - in photos and videos, as well as on stage - to the victims of fanaticism and militarism combined: ‘We see that people of religion are (...) the greatest threat to humanity,’ and that victory in war emerges from ‘brutality they inflict on others, whose lives don’t matter. It’s really a subject we’re facing today (...) The people are the victims, the losers.’

The result is something familiar to us all, when artists are brought in to direct. Rather than a production of Aida per se, what we see has a ‘Gleichzeitig!’ feel to it; only here, instead of a commedia dell’arte troupe playing while Ariadne laments on her island, a quite conventional (albeit handsomely-costumed) opera is performed - as if incidentally - by soloists who are left to their own devices as far as acting is concerned, in the midst of a large-scale Shirin Neshat exhibition combining black-and-white photos and film clips with engaging young actors and dancers. In short, a ‘vintage’ opera has apparently strayed into a contemporary-art installation. There are some very good-looking tableaux, but there are also puzzling gaps in the action while videos and slide-shows are projected, and the soloists’ stock operatic gestures seem to come from another era than their modern surroundings.

For the record, the central element in the set is a monumental, white ‘concrete’ cube that revolves and opens up to form the various spaces required, including, at the end, the tomb. Sometimes - for example in the very successful temple scene - a grouping of vertical tubular lights is suspended above. There are no particular visual references to Egypt as such, though in projections we do see, e.g. a medieval fortress, and a lot of sand. Aida has a plain black dress and goes barefoot. Amneris wears floating chiffon dresses that change colour with the acts. (Judit Kutasi swept their long trains aside angrily every time she turned; I don’t know if this was a deliberate element of the mise en scène, but it certainly made her look petulant.) Radames wears an ordinary, modern uniform.

The priests, with their long beards, look Orthodox, whether Greek or Coptic, and Ramfis’s fine gauze coat recalls (to me, at least) those favoured by Iran’s rich senior clerics - or Saudi princes. The priestesses are in flowing black and white robes, as much nuns’ habits as the chadors that often feature in Neshat’s work. Dark, enigmatic dervish- or KKK- or penitent-like figures with pointed headgear sometimes stalk by. The young extras or dancers roughed up (and eventually machine-gunned after their pardon) by the military (‘the people are the victims, the losers’) wear the simple, modern black that young extras or dancers wear.

Photos and videos of migrants in a boat, veiled women, women hunched in a circle digging a grave with their bare hands, funeral rites, men carrying bodies, and so on, point to notions of oppression, submission, exile, and torn identities. Both a beast and a naked girl are sacrificed. As in Iran today, the women - e.g. in Amneris’s chamber, and including Amneris herself - demonstrate their strength and resistance in face-offs with the uniformed powers-that-be.

However, as I said, in the midst of all this, the soloists are more or less left to their own devices. Ewa Płonka’s voice, as Aida, was initially - like some of the wines I sipped gingerly in Greece this summer - thin and tart and short on sensuality and seductiveness. She improved after the interval, but even then, while she has all the notes, her sound remains dry and she sings with limited emotional impact - indeed, in this case limited impact tout court, as her voice is a notch too small for the Bastille. Her personality never asserts itself more than as a kind of Verdian Micaëla. Puzzling casting, to me, for a major international house, especially one of this size. 

In the case of Judit Kutasi (Amneris), those ‘own devices’ hovered perilously - depending in part on the colour of her dress - between Divine (red), Mae West (white) and the petulant Miss Piggie (like Dolora Zajick in the Met production), any of whom, my neighbour unkindly suggested at half time, might have been preferable. She’s certainly game, and visibly believes in what she’s doing, but, moodily twirling her blond tresses between her fingers in her boudoir, still recalls La Gran Scena’s Vera Galupe-Borszkh. Sometime in her career, the basic material of her voice must have been sound; it was intermittently one of the most Verdian of the evening. But there are times you just can’t figure out what she’s singing, as if everything - notes, diction and all - were swallowed up in a generous vibrato. She too, however, fortunately firmed up somewhat after the interval.

Gregory Kunde, once he’s warmed up and his voice has settled, is (albeit with audible effort) astonishingly good, though it hardly seems necessary to say so as everyone already knows. But the character he projects, sober, wise and fatherly, isn't seductive, let alone that of an impetuous young warrior-lover (I doubt that in the first cast, Beczala, the eternal matinee idol, was that either). Undirected, his acting was of the sagely-nodding, chin-stroking kind. And I’m afraid that at one point, when buffeted between opposing parties, he reminded me momentarily of Michel Sénéchal as Ménélas getting shunted off to Crete in Laurent Pelly’s Belle Hélène.

‘Pas la distribution du siècle,’ not the cast of the century, was my neighbour’s reaction to this vocal curate’s egg, though he agreed that the supporting roles - Roman Burdenko’s ardently dramatic Amonasro, Alexander Köpeczi’s elegant, velvety Ramfis, Krzysztof Bączyk’s jet-black king, Margarita Polonskaya’s supple, fluent Sacerdotessa - were well filled.

But in the end, the stars of the show were the young conductor, Dmitry Matvienko, the orchestra and the chorus. I said, when writing about the Brussels concert that opened this new season, that Matvienko’s conducting there boded well for his Verdi here, and - though I say it myself - I was right. He is visibly attentive to both stage and pit, while bringing clarity, colour, contrast and nuance, along with a rhythmic spring, to the score. Never before have I felt Verdi’s ballets (not actually danced in this production, so it was easy to focus on the pit) were a highlight of an evening of Aida: played with delicacy, they sparkled colourfully like something by Rimsky-Korsakov. And the chorus in the temple scene was sublime - Matvienko is Belarus and studied in St Petersburg. He must have the Orthodox sound in his veins. He’s now based in Aarhus, but as far as I’m concerned, he can come to Paris whenever he wants.

Which reminds me: have they found a new music director for the Paris Opera yet?

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.