Aida, Opera North, review: a triumph of music-making from a powerhouse company 

Opera North has made a grand success of its semi-staged concert-hall productions of some of the biggest beasts (the Ring cycle, Turandot, and Salome among them) in the operatic zoo. Latest addition to the menagerie is Verdi’s Aida, a work indelibly associated with the circus spectacle of its military triumph scene, but also one of the composer’s most emotionally intense and concise achievements.

Against a background of designs by Joanna Parker that unassertively suggest an analogy between this tale of Pharaonic Egypt and contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, the director Annabel Arden struggles to make these two aspects cohere.

Her animation of the chorus, wearing modern casual clothes and banked up oratorio-fashion behind the orchestra, is brilliantly imaginative – their gestures highly formalised but starkly expressive too. She is less successful, however, with the interaction of the principals, who sink at intervals to hand-wringing histrionics that belong to bad old tradition. Nor has Arden found a convincing way to represent the geography of the denouement, in which hero and heroine are suffocatingly buried alive – showing Aida crouched under a table was faintly comical.

But the Victorian splendours of Leeds Town Hall provide a magnificent backdrop, and the music does the rest. The score is in the experienced hands of Richard Armstrong: never one to linger or moderate the volume, his conducting is brightly coloured, electrically exciting and sometimes a little too hectic for the singers’ comfort and security of ensemble.