Tamar, a gutsy Amneris in Bregenz © Miro Kuzmanovic 2009

Despite the Bregenz Festival's good intentions, two formidable forces dictate its repertoire — Mother Nature and the Vorarlberg Public Transportation System. Bregenz's famous lake stage and its 7,000-seat arena face west, so performances cannot begin until sunset — 9:15 P.M. in July, 9:00 P.M. in August. A sleepy little village that barely shakes itself awake at festival time, Bregenz does not support enough hotel rooms to accommodate festival visitors, so many operagoers must travel to other towns. Public transportation ceases at about midnight.

Add to this the virtual impossibility of moving 7,000 people in and out of the arena for an intermission, and you are straitjacketed into giving an opera that must start after sundown, be performed without an intermission and get everybody out in time for the last trains and buses.

Thus my curiosity was piqued when I heard plans to mount Aida — a work that runs roughly one hundred and sixty minutes — on the lake stage. My worst fears were realized when I saw the production on August 2.

Conductor Carlo Rizzi sliced and diced the score to fit the time frame: the show ran two hours and seven minutes. Huge sections of the score were jettisoned — for instance, the entire second verse of "O patria mia" — and Rizzi's often insane tempos simply screamed, "Let's get this over with!"

If there was a great directorial concept supporting this speedy Aida, one might have been able to accept it. But director Graham Vick and designer Paul Brown seemed intent on filling up every bit of time and space: things got so crowded that locating the person who was singing at any given moment proved to be difficult.

Brown strewed the detritus of a decadent society across a vast staircase and into the lake and bookended the playing area with two giant construction cranes that whirred and buzzed and occasionally clunked as they maneuvered chunks of scenery into stage pictures. The physical highlight came in the triumph scene, with the assembly of an azure-blue figure, covered with golden stars, that was uncomfortably similar in silhouette to the Statue of Liberty. Radamès returned victorious from battle on a giant gold elephant-boat with orange-suited prisoners below, their heads covered with black bags. It seems that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay will be with us for years to come, at least in European opera productions: slaves were here treated as party objects, and Amneris was often seen with a black-hooded man on a leash.

Tatiana Serjan has a lovely voice, but it was just not big enough for those Verdian waves that Aida needs to ride. A handsome Radamès, Rubens Pelizzari showed sweet, generous tone that significantly thinned out as his vocal line rose. Iain Paterson was an impressive, lyrical Amonasro, Tigran Martirossian a stentorian Ramfis.

Iano Tamar has had a highly successful career as a soprano, so her tour-de-force surprise jump down into mezzo territory made for the evening's big news. This was not a case of a soprano singing a mezzo's music but a full-fledged, gutsy performance with uninhibited chest voice and blazing top notes. It was the most exciting Amneris I've heard since Elena Obraztsova came to the Met, more than thirty years ago.

LARRY L. LASH

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