24.02.2015

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21st Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival opened on 30th August 2014 with Verdi’s Aida staged by Izmir State Opera and Ballet. Aspendos Festival, after Istanbul Music Festival which was started in 1972 as Turkey’s first ever real international art festival, comes first among the famous and respected classical music festivals of this country.
 
Aspendos Opera and Ballet Festival owes its popularity mostly to the significance of its venue, which is an antique open-air theatre. That is this magnificent amphitheatre which popularizes this much the Roman city of Aspendos, a site 40 kilometres to the East of Antalya which is one of the favourite touristic cities of Turkey. Aspendos Amphitheatre is one of few Antique Age constructions that survived to this day with minimum damage. This theatre with a diameter of 96 metres and a seating capacity of 7,000 people, was built in 155 B.C. by the Greek architect Zeno. This theatre, which was periodically restored by the Seljuqs who inhabited Anatolia in the following centuries, has been the host of the Aspendos Opera and Ballet Festival held since 1993 in modern Turkey. Known with its splendid acoustics, the antique theatre, every year in this season, is the staging spot for not only the opera performances from the previous season by certain Turkish State campaigns but also those by foreign campaigns invited.
 
The 2014 festival held between the dates August 30 and September 24, after being inaugurated with Verdi’s Aida staged by the Izmir State Opera and Ballet, continued, respectively, with Attila (Verdi), La Traviata (Verdi) and Herkules (Handel), as well as the ballet performances of Notre Dame de Paris and Harem by Mersin, Antalya and Ankara’s state opera campaigns. In this year’s festival, the Budapest Operetta and Musical Theatre participated with a special programme called “Gala of Operattas”, while the Taormina Festival Opera campaign from Sicilia staged Tosca.  
 
I watched Aida from Izmir State Opera for the third time this season, at the festival opening night on 30th of August. A cast of best singers was meticulously chosen for the leading roles of this special performance. Evren Ekşi, the soprano soloist from Istanbul State Opera, who sings the role of Aida, put forth a much better performance than the two ones I watched in Izmir. Her singing was passionate and fragile. And this time we could listen to her impressive pianissimos in open air. On the other hand, we also witnessed her lower tones usually being muffled by the orchestra. Evren Ekşi sang the arias “Ritorna vincitor” and “O patria mia” with a very high-calibre interpretation.
 
Spanish tenor Enrique Ferrer, a known figure in Turkish opera stages, endeavoured to unit his lyrical and sweet voice with the heroic posture of Radamès. Although he had a minor memory loss while singing “Celeste Aida”, soon put himself together and, especially in the second act, he depicted a successful Radamès profile with his beautiful voice and impressive stage stance. Yet, I think the Turkish tenor Levent Gündüz (also a successful Othello interpreter), who sang in the second performance I watched in Izmir, had reflected Radamès’ heroic side more powerfully on stage.
 
Elena Gabouri, one of the best Amneris interpreters of our day, was one of the strongest sides of the performance in Aspendos. What’s more, I can easily say that she surpassed Aida and Radamès, shinning above them. She, drifting above the orchestra, ingeniously and without slightest difficulty, managed to carry her very powerful, rich mid and lower tones, to the top point of the monumental amphitheatre. The audience rewarded Gabouri, who locked all eyes on her throughout the opera performance with her voice and acting, with a standing ovation. I suppose, from now on, we shall see Gabouri, one of the favourite singers of Verona Festival, more frequently at Aspendos and on other Turkish stages.
 
And Burak Bilgili who holds the title of “the first Turkish singer ever to sing in New York Metropolitan Opera, interestingly, with his Aida performance at Aspondos, did his opera debut in Turkey. Bilgili who has been leading a career in the States for several years, in this pretty late debut performance both for himself and for his followers, put forth all his experience and drew an exceptional Ramfis portrait.
 
Hasan Alptekin, another experienced Turkish bass who sang the King, impressed us with his easy-flowing and natural interpretation. Tamer Pekin, a soloist from Izmir State Opera, is one of the best baritones of today’s Turkish Opera. Gifted with the rarest vocal beauty, Peker, singing the role of Amonasro with a perfect technique and interpretation, was another star of the night.
 
The 76 members of the Izmir State Opera and Ballet Orchestra, gave a good performance under the baton of their Argentine musical director Tuglio Gagliardo Varas, who has been conducting them since 7 years. Indeed, that night the conditions were so challenging for all of the musicians. Because temperature and humidity in Antalya, which normally range above the seasonal normals, had a peak that night, which made us to watch Aida performance under a weather of 40 Celcius degrees with a humidity of %80. The Ethiopians and Egytians on stage were not only fighting against each other but also against sweltry and extreme humidity, not to forget the orchestra in the pit. Besides, we can say that the Izmir State Opera Orchestra, with Lalecan Ozay Muzaffer on principal violin, came out smelling roses. Yet, although the Izmir Opera Choir was successful in general, we cannot say that discordant voices with bad intonation from the Priest’s Chorus didn’t scratch our ears at times.

Another experienced name of the Turkish Opera, the producer Aytaç Manizade, again preferred symbolic expression decorating the Aspendos stage with a minimal set design. On a setting where few pillars with hieroglyphics as a representation of Egyptian civilization were placed, she consulted to laser lighting to highlight intense dramatization, another example of the effects Manizade typically used in her other productions, too. But if white colour were preferred instead of green in laser, as she also admitted, far more effective scenes could be captured.
 
Another intriguing feature of the Manizade production was that during the famous “Triumph March” scene, instead of the typical triumph parade, male and female dancers, dressed in today’s USA Army uniforms, did pas de deux. It was Manizade’s contemporary critic of the Middle East War Site where USA intervenes as a military power. Meanwhile, the Nile Scene also had its share from Manizade’s symbolic expression: Gigantic wave images projected to the back wall of the amphitheatre and a model crocodile facing the auditorium were to depict the Nile river. This Aida production by Izmir State Opera and Ballet, will be staged in Izmir, in the next season.

Serhan Bali