Customer Reviews

Aida

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The quality of this DVD is amazing. An 18 year old Sophia was precise and convincing in her "lip sync" of the great Renata Tebaldi. Her acting phenomenal. This is a treasure.

This film version of Aida features Sophia Loren at the outset of her career. Besides her stunning beauty, she is totally involved in the character, and her lypsyncing to Renata Tebaldi's voice is very accurate. Luciano della Marra as Radames has the right look, and the singing is dubbed by Giuseppe Campora. Lois Maxwell as Amneris delivers a fine portrayal, and is properly villainous, and convincingly vulnarable towards the end of the judgement scene. Ebe Stignani does the singing. Afro Poli, a reknowned baritone is a striking and powerful Amonasro. His singing is dubbed by the famous Gino Bechi. I'm surprised that Afro Poli does not do his own singing, even though I'm a big admirer of Bechi.

The video quality is very good, although the colors appear to be on the bright side. I recommend this DVD highly.

In spite of the heavy make-up to make her look Ethyopian, Sofia - that's how her first name was spelled before Hollywood renamed her Sophia - manages to project a truly moving image of passion (for her Egyptian lover Radames) and duty (for her imprisoned Ethyopian father). In later years the soprano Renata Tebaldi remembered the actress as being ¨... a very shy and simple girl, quite different from the sophisticated woman she later became".

The score has been somewhat shortened, so what you get is not the complete opera, but about 90% of it. Sets and costumes are quite rich and the second act "divertissement" was choreographed by Léonide Massine.

A disclaimer at the start of the video says that this DVD has been assembled from surviving sources and is the best available. Really? Was there some sort of opera-lovers' witch hunt, destroying all a but a few extant prints? From the look of what remains there might have been a good-to-great film of Aida somewhere in the dark past, but its hard to tell from what is presented here.

Editing seems to have been performed with a hatchet and scotch tape by a blind, tone-deaf drunkard.

What remains of the music is sung by as good a cast as one might have assembled anywhere in 1951. Tebaldi is in her glory years; Stignani, a veteran by then, shows no sign of decline; Campora was secure and Bechi in fine form. What little of the chorus we get to hear is solid, and the orchestra is fine.

The sets and costumes are Hollywood-style sumptuous and nearly as tacky as you could get, and additional scenes have been staged and music composed and arranged for battle scenes that aren't in the opera.

If you are looking for a video of Verdi's masterpiece DO NOT BUY THIS!

If you are an opera queen looking for a campy party tape, this might do the trick. (The actor playing Radames is pretty enough and there are plenty of hunky shirtless extras in miniskirts to fuel the replay button.)

If you collect cinematic or operatic ephemera, this is for you. Sophia Loren fans will want it, too.

This was not what I expected at all. The dubbing was just awful. I gave it away.