By the 1870s, Giuseppe Verdi was living in comfortable semi-retirement as a gentleman farmer. From the 1860s onwards it took increasingly greater efforts to tempt him to take up his pen and all of his late operas (Don Carlos, Aida, Otello and Falstaff) therefore clearly meant a great deal to the composer. His Egyptian epic was first performed at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo on December 24, 1871 and despite certain problems with the static plot – there’s a tendency for the work to become a series of tableaux – the composer lavished some of his finest music on the score in orchestrations that achieved a new degree of translucence. Aida’s story is essentially a forbidden love triangle played out in intense scenes against a backdrop of monumental religion and political machinations. A pity then, that Gale Edwards’ gaudy production seems to focus on the latter with little done to create an atmosphere to support and explore the intimacy of the former. What we get is a staging set somewhere between an Arab oil state, an episode of Dynasty and a low-budget sci-fi.

Adding up the pluses...