“Aida” in South Africa: a Sonic Earthquake

Photo: Oscar O’Ryan

Never in an opera house have I thrilled to such a sonic earthquake as the wall of sound produced by the Cape Town Opera in its current production of Verdi’s Aida. In the triumphal scene, the stage is packed with robust Black voices, all functioning at full throttle. A decibel more would be painful to the ears. 

A crucial ingredient – the reason nothing comparable is possible at the Metropolitan Opera – is the scale of the house: 1,487 seats, versus the Met’s 3,800. And the acoustics (as experienced from row G in the orchestra) are terrific.

Cape Town has a long history of opera, including many distinguished Italian visitors. Today, the singers are South Africans. The company remains a vital component of the city’s cultural life. Aida is being given five times and the entire run seems sold out. The audience (overwhelmingly white) is expectant, appreciative, warmly enthusiastic. The company (overwhelmingly Black) is a company, an ensemble, populated by “house soloists.”

Nobulumko Mngxekeza, singing Aida, was introduced to music when she joined her high school chorus. She later studied voice at the University of Cape Town College of Music – a trajectory that has in recent decades produced countless South African operatic artists now featured in Europe and the United States. She commands a rich-hued soprano of good size. Her previous roles, all lighter, include Bess, Pamina, and Micaela.

The company’s pit orchestra is the Cape Town Philharmonic, a practiced full-time professional ensemble. The Aida conductor is the company’s music director, Kamal Khan. Though I found his reading unexceptional, the house’s vivid pit acoustic insures high impact, especially from the low brass. 

The Aida director, Magdalene Minnaar, is a South African soprano who also serves as the company’s artistic director. She has conceived an “Afro-Futurist” production, strangely set and costumed. To my eyes, it contributed little but rarely got in the way – excepting four robotic supernumeraries whose rapid mechanical gait at all times violated the music. The contributions of the choreographer, Gregory Vuyani Maqoma, were both more telling and more original.  

What I most appreciated was the buoyancy and informality of the occasion. (I am told it is difficult even to purchase a suit and tie in cosmopolitan Cape Town.) Of opera as an elite pastime there is not even a whiff.  The season to date has notably included a festival of short operas (with piano accompaniment), including new works plus Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. The Barber of Seville and The Magic Flute are coming up.