Aida in Sacramento

The Sacramento Opera company, for its second opera, did Aida over the weekend (also on Tuesday). It was a superb production from staging to voices to the orchestra.

Aida is one of my favorite operas. It was originally written by Verdi to be performed in Egypt (not to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal). But it was delayed in its opening because of the Franco-Prussian war. Like many of Verdi's other works it has a dozen or so great tunes and a set of recurring themes that keep coming back.

The standout of the evening was Oksana Sitnitska who made her US opera debut with this company. She has a stunning Mezzo voice and wonderful stage presence. She is originally from the Ukraine but I expect her to soon be at the top of the international ranks of singers. But the rest of the cast matched Sitnitska's performance. Hope Briggs was Aida, Drew Slaton played Radames, Ralph Cato was Amonasro and Donald Sherrill was Ramfis, Gregory Stapp was the King.

The sets were from the Met production and are pretty simple but very useful.

Aida is a hard production to mount. I was on the Sacramento board when the company last presented it. We used Llamas for the grand march because it would have cost $100,000 to reinforce the stage to use elephants. To do the opera right requires a pretty big group of lead singers and a large chorus. But this production was masterful.