Where The Aida Survey Is So Far

  Tucker's Law of Musical Performance: Verdi's Aida--78-88 years

This is not a consumer review, this is a kind of attempt, through the history of Aida performance on record, to make a pocket history of Italian opera in a long period when Italian opera doesn't matter through. 

Aida was premiered in Cairo in 1871. If we are to believe the Molajoli/Sabajno recordings, it took a lifetime as it always does to fully acclimate to the demands of a great work of art. Aida is one of the three or four most iconic operas ever written (ABCD: Aida, Boheme, Carmen, Die Walkure), but it does not play itself like Verdi's Big Three (Rig/Trov/Trav) which can be played by any ol' small opera company in reduced forces and still make its impact.

Aida is big, Aida is decadent, and it needs the greatness of a great orchestra, a great conductor, giant voices in a giant hall with giant sets. The Golden Age of opera had to be over by the time Aida ascended to the top of opera's pantheon. But is there a recording out there which portrays decadence without becoming decadent itself?

My answer is that there was a particular moment in the 50s when Aida was taken truly seriously. I forget who said it but some Broadway composer said that musical theater circles back every 80 years to old styles and relearns lessons it forgot, and to me, 80 years is roughly the time it takes for performers to be worthy of the greatest classical works: to understand and master them.

So in that sense, Aida is not a work of the 1870s, it is a work of the 1950s. So many performers around that time truly seemed to understand Aida, not as melodrama or exhibition, and not as just another comfortable night at the opera, but as a great work of art: gripping and challenging. Artists started coming to terms with it in the most serious way: Toscanini of course, but also Gui, Alberto Erede, Antonino Votto, and even John Barbirolli. Well known singers like Maria Callas and Lyonie Rysanek, and unknowns like Catarina Mancini and Mario Filipeschi, and serious artists like Antonietta Stella and Giulietta Simoniatto. There were complacent recordings in that era too, but the greatest achieved something that went beyond mere opera and became the great art that is always there in Verdi for those willing to find it. But by 1959-60 it was all over: the Solti and Karajan recordings were released, Aida became a blockbuster, not an opera, and while certain artists got it, they swam against the current. Aida became a lavish sets, high decibles and high kitsch. Those who understood it had to revive operas old traditions and reject the new ones. 

de Sabata/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 9

Panizza/Cigna: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

Beecham/Caniglia: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

The first essential recording of Aida, to me at least, is Victor de Sabata leading La Scala in 1937 Berlin. It's not deep, it's not art, it's not even complete--some of my favorite scenes are missing, but as an exhibition, it is magnificent: de Sabata, La Scala, Gina Cigna, Beniamino Gigli and Ebe Stignani. Is it a serious examination of Aida? Well... is Aida a serious work of art? It is great opera as great opera gets, but... um... the jury is out.... The same goes in the same year in New York. Gina Cigna somehow sings in both Berlin and at the Metropolitan in 1937. In New York she was partnered with the more 'heroic tenor' Giovanni Martinelli and Bruna Castagna, along with Ettore Panizza, the one conductor who played Verdi with even less subtlety than de Sabata. And if that isn't enough, you've got Gigli and Stignani two years later in London with Maria Caniglia, a slightly more lyric 'spinto' than Cigna's trumpet tones under Thomas Beecham, the world's greatest podium entertainer. The sound of all three is atrocious, but all three are glorious. They're more than art or entertainment, they're part of the history of the world: documents of how the grandest opera inflamed the world. Opera may be a thing of the past, but so long as opera can put on loud and lavish entertainments like Aida, it can offer the world things musical theater and movies cannot possibly match.

How's it done? Singers with technique so secure that they seem able to do anything at all: so secure that you can maintain the vocal line through all histrionics, hold notes out forever loud and soft, sing over the world's loudest orchestras (which may have been about half as loud back then...), phrase in such a way that the back of the hall hears the nuances as well as the front, float notes like velvet on air or hurl them out like a poisoned arrow. You hear great singers inspiring each other and if the conductor's great, he gets the orchestra to inspire the singers too. Electric sparks fly that could incinerate whole city blocks. You have conductors who follow them everywhere through whatever odd twists and turns they do in interpretations so outsize that they sometimes take twice as much time to get through a phrase as lesser stars did twenty years previously.  Just listen to the effects Beniamino Gigli constantly strains for: half his lines start a split second early with words like 'uh-NUUUU-MEN' as a way of catching your attention. Toscanini would throw him out of the theater, and in a work of elegant proportions like Traviata or Rigoletto, that's the height of vulgarity. But Aida? Well, it's pretty much in keeping with the whole thing's spirit. 

When you hear the Greek inevitability of Toscanini, the infinite colors of elderly Riccardo Muti, the nuance of Vittorio Gui, the perfect balance of Alberto Erede, the heart and soul of John Barbirolli, and when you hear the absolute miracles of texture Karajan works in his second recording (more on that anon), who can possibly doubt the artistic seriousness of this? But then you hear so much vocal grandstanding, so much conducting grandstanding, and you realize that this exhibitionism is built into the work at its pyramidal foundation. Some performances take Aida as a dare to make the work so larger than life that you can't even hear the peaks. Yet that said, there is enormous pleasure in high notes and orchestral fireworks and lavish sets just as there is in movie explosions and sex scenes. It's exhibition, but exhibition can be awesome.

But because there is so much exhibitionism, there is also so much complacency. Other performances sound so tired of Aida that they sound like just another runthrough by people who are as tired of hearing the piece as I often am.

How many recordings really do something like justice to the piece? Well, a lot if you want to hear opera as opera. I get somewhat impatient with that kind of exhibitionism as I get older.

Solti/Price: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Breaks the scale 

The greatest vocalism? As far as I'm concerned, there's only one choice, and it's not the one people usually say. The greatest vocalism is Leontyne Price, Jon Vickers, Rita Gorr, Robert Merrill--four stars in the flush of youth in fantastic sound, under an all-too fired up Georg Solti. Unfortunately, the problem is the inexperience of it. Solti is still 49. It's not the loudness... ... ok it is the loudness, but not just that. Solti had just became a star, and he became a star because he was willing to amp up the fireworks to a level that more tasteful, more cultured maestri knew better than to do. Solti was a great opera conductor, and in more genial operas like Cosi, Zauberflote, Carmen, Onegin, he could be the epitome of magnificence, but then you get 'Grand Solti', the Solti we remember, and he was a voice wrecker: amping up the noise of his orchestra for excitement's sake while knowing that he risked blowing out the voices of his singers. We have been on this track ever since. like in his famous Wagner, he never quite mastered pacing in those years, and in between the fireworks of awesome excitement comes quiet parts that drain the blood from mosquitos.

Toscanini/Nelli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 3 1/2

If you want well-paced excitement, well... there's only once place to go: Toscanini, Toscanini, Toscanini. Nobody understood Verdi at the fundament like Toscanini did: every detail in 1949 was etched perfectly in hieroglyphs, with Robert Shaw's chorus and a magnificent handpicked orchestra of American musicians for NBC. The only problem? The singers. I doubt any star singer in America would put up with Toscanini's bullshit, his dictatorial mien, his legendary temper, or apparently his cheapness (apparently that was a thing...). Now, nobody generates more bullshit than singers, but Toscanini deliberately chose the most white bread singers, including a young and very nervous Richard Tucker (no relation) and his "pupil" Herva Nelli. But at least they could sing their parts: you also have to put up with the Amneris of one Eva Gustafsson, who sounds a bit like Julia Child.

Callas/De Fabritiis: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 10

There is, of course, the famous live Callas in 1951 Mexico City where she tosses off a high E-Flat at the end of the Triumphal March. One youtuber called it the most famous opera recording ever... I never even heard of this recording until the era of youtube... It's certainly a high voltage affair--everybody keeps up with Callas: Mario del Monaco, Oriala Dominguez, Giuseppe Taddei, and Oliviero de Fabritiis lights a fire under a Latin orchestra that seemed to need no extra fire. The sound is quite bad, but that recording is great opera. It is not, however, great art. It's a shapeless mass that takes wing in the moment of the performance and relates no moment of the performance to the moment that came before or comes after. Great artistry had to wait for Callas to find a partner worthy of her.

Gui/Mancini: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6 1/2

But then things really start to cook. 1951 also hears such august legends of opera history as Caterina Mancini and Mario FIlippeschi assuming the principals. Unknowns they may be, but they are magnificent, as are better known singers like Giulietta Simoniato and Rolando Panerai, with RAI Roma under the watchful eye of the great Vittorio Gui, who would easily be the leading conductor of any country that didn't have Toscanini and de Sabata--but at this point I prefer Gui to them both. The vast majority of the time the tempi stays in the ballpark of Verdi's metronome markings, and yet within that framework Gui seems to set a new pace every fifteen seconds. The orchestra isn't great, but it's Verdi in Rome, do you really think they don't know how to play it? The only problem is the sound, which sounds as though it keeps the all important orchestra in the opera house next door to the opera house where it's playing. It is such a shame: this is probably the greatest conducting we have ever heard of Aida, and yet you can barely hear the orchestra.

Erede/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But the next year comes a recording overseen by Alberto Erede, one of those maestri di capella whom we took for granted, who on their average days made the trains run on time, and on the great days provided a level of involvement and inspiration that was never inhibited by a lack of knowledge about the idiom. All one can say is that this is greatness. Is Erede as great as Gui or Toscanini? Of course not. Erede was a maestro di capella, Vittorio Gui is one of the most underrated conductors of the 20th century. Erede cannot possibly hope to generate the fireworks of a star conductor and orchestra in the Triumphal March, but for once it seems like a solemn ancient triumph, not a state fair. But Erede was nobody's fool, once an assistant to Fritz Busch in Dresden. He's not as literal as Toscanini, not as supple as Gui, not as trusted by singers as Serafin, but he combines the best of all three (along with a magnificent octave up rewrite of the brass in the triumphal march scene); always in the ballpark of the score without being a slave to it, and here you can hear the damn orchestra! Just to give an example of how great Erede is: in Act 1 Scene II, my favorite scene, every time the male chorus ansewrs the Priestess's 'Possente' the chorus is just a little bit slower than the time before. Furthermore, we get to hear Tebaldi and del Monaco in embryo, two of the great voices of all time, young and hungry, ready to give absolutely everything. Even Tebaldi provides emotional involvement, and occasionally you can even hear a quiet note from del Monaco! The now seasoned Ebe Stignani is a little past her prime, but she keeps up with these young lions the way she once kept up with Gigli and Cigna.

Callas/Barbirolli: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8

And then there's the greatest romantic reading. Not the greatest Aida, certainly not the greatest sounding Aida, far from the most perfect, but romanticism at its best: John Barbirolli in an actual honest to god opera broadcast: twenty years after he swore off opera after making his bones (batons) there, here he is, showing what the fuss was over fifteen years before he returned to opera when he was already past it. Barbirolli and Callas, who would have ever thought? Giulietta Simoniato next to them, luxury casting in the basses with Michael Langdon and Giulio Neri, and no less than a 26 year old Joan Sutherland singing the priestess. The only unfortunate presence is entirely too German sounding Kurt Baum sounding like he wandered over from a production of the Merry Widow. I love Barbirolli the way I love Gigli: everything's over the top and I couldn't care less. He never misses a chance to start a rallentando five bars early, to linger on a recitative like it's already a love duet, but unlike certain more mummified conductors, at least he speeds up as much as he slows down. This is romanticism as it should be done: what comes out exhibitionist when done by de Sabata and Muti sounds like emotion itself under Glorious John. Known as the great accompanist of his time, he's the perfect partner for Callas, not just supporting her but encouraging her every dramatic instinct. I don't know if it's at all appropriate for Aida, it feels like Callas is singing Tosca, but her intensity is positively feral. For those who believe opera is mere melodrama, she schools us all here as everywhere else. Even if she doesn't have a Radames to match, she is so absorbing here that she needs no Radames at all.

So let's pause for a second: why, in my perception, is the Barbirolli/Callas so much closer to the spirit than other ultra-romantic performances from the late thirties? The answer is that one approach feels like an arena event, and one feels sacred. One feels as though it's meant to excite, one feels as though it's meant to move. What feels hammy at the old Met is felt at Covent Garden. What feels attacked in Berlin feels inhabited in London. What feels like a party fifteen years earlier at 30s CG feels like a rite of the soul in 50s CG.

And then, over the course of one year, you have three very good but extremely imperfect recordings that take the work very seriously:

Serafin/Callas: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 4

Maria Callas, Fedora Barbieri and a more mature Richard Tucker at La Scala under the ever-reliable Tulio Serafin. Callas is... not Aida. Some people will go for Callas in anything the same way some people will go for Olivier or Streep in anything. I am not one of them: mature women like Tosca and Violetta, sure, but ingenues like Aida and Gilda? Fuck no... Even when Callas was in her twenties she sounded 47 and had the romantic appeal of a lady in the Trump cabinet. Nevertheless, what makes Callas Callas is that even when she is utterly unsuited to the role, she finds things in it nobody else does. 'Actorly' it may be, but every line reading has intention and nuance and character: even if it gives the impression of a 60 year old Meryl Streep playing Juliet, it's still a wonderful performance of its type. Everybody else takes a back seat to the Callas show: only Tito Gobbi has a fighting chance to get the spotlight off her. Everything else is rather... mid?

Kubelik/Rysanek: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 6

Still better than them both is my dear Rafael Kubelik, conducting the Vienna Opera with singers like Lyonie Ryzanek, Hans Hopf, Jean Madeira, George London... are we sure this is Aida and not a Wagner opera?... and sure enough, it's in German. But for what it is, it's absolutely glorious. If you can imagine Italian vowels amid all that vocalism, magnificently played and paced, put those brutal German consonants out of your mind.

Karajan/Tebaldi: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 2

But then we start getting to decadence like that Solti recording, and also the first by that other voice wrecker: Herbert von Karajan: frankly the worse voice wrecker. More on that anon again. In 1959, Karajan is barely fifty, and he doesn't have many ideas about Aida yet. This is more a 'record' than it is a performance or an interpretation. It is clear, at least to me, that Karajan is not in charge here. The producer is: the once famous John Culshaw, who in his lifetime had a power that exceeded even Karajan's. Culshaw wanted an artificial soundstage, and Karajan, always intrigued by recording technology, provided everything Culshaw wanted. The result was that Karajan had a brand to manufacture rather than ideas. It is all very Karajanish: polished and so imposing in loud moments it sounds sculpted from marble, but the many intriguing ideas of Karajan's twenty-years-later remake are not here. In its place we have bombast: inflated tempi, inflated orchestral sound, inflated singer mic placements, inflated dynamic contrasts that leave you turning the volume dial up and down. In Renata Tebaldi, the world's greatest singer and worst actress, Karajan had the perfect Aida for his conception and the perfect Amanasro in Cornell MacNeill (must be a family thing...). Poor Carlo Bergonzi and Giulietta Simoniato thought they were recording Verdi but are stuck in an entombed monument. Simoniato was so good, so complex, so caught between ferocity and tenderness that in the beginning of Act IV, she briefly warms Karajan up, but otherwise this Verdi has more Wagner in it than Solti's Ring.

Mehta/Apollo to Dionysus Meter: Something this shallow breaks the scale. 

The next stage of decadence is 1965, when we get Birgit Nilsson as Aida: Wagner's trumpet herself, along with the most dangerous tenor of them all: Franco Corelli, who as always holds nothing back and whose electricity threatens to obscure even the largest voice and loudest orchestra, and that's what he gets. The Rome Opera Orchestra plays like the world's loudest orchestra when mic'd this closely, and they are inflamed by Zubin Mehta at all of 29, and still with us at 90. As always with Mehta, the sound defines thrills and passion and lushness, and there is nary a detail to be found. Nary an orchestral crescendo, nary a rubato, nary even a piano; all taken at the safest possible tempos at every moment to convey Mehta's massive mass. Even then, Mehta was a master of short cuts. The Act III prelude seems to be the one time he glances at the metronome, and it's one of the few markings that doesn't work--no violin section can ever coordinate those spiccatos evenly at that speed: and you realize Mehta takes it at the recommended speed because he has no desire to savor the delicacy and the langor. This recording announces it is unapologetic spectacle from the first 'guerra'. Visceral excitement everywhere, punching with as much force and speed as George Foreman. It is Aida the carnival, and this party rages. It's a great recording, it's also absolutely shameless. It is left to Grace Bumbry to keep up with these cyclones, and she acquits herself pretty well, but no mic can hide just how much more powerful those other two voices are. Bumbry is the only person here trying to find any seriousness. 

Muti/Caballe: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 8 1/2

Then there is that even more magnificent 1974 recording of Muti and Caballe. Magnificent of its type that is... Muti is absolutely ferocious in that Al Pacino way where everything is senselessly hammed in a manner that is more about the performer than the work, but nobody can deny the absolute charisma of it. The triumph scene is an absolute carnival: you can practically sea the roller coasters and cotton candy, but my god does he get the grandeur here: only Muti and Levine approach Toscanini in this all-crucial scene. Everything about this reading is melodramatic, but Aida is melodramatic. Furthermore, Muti at 33 did not yet have the cache to rein in interventionist singers like Caballe and Cosotto: so the scenes between them become a melodramatic campfest of hellcats. Caballe does not miss a chance for the kind of portamento and pitch losing accent that would drive Muti crazy, while Cosotto spits her accents out like a snake does her venom: dots are doubled all over the place. You can even hear the imperturbable Piero Cappucilli straining his voice to match Muti's knife-wielder energy. This is much more about the fireworks than Verdi. Some dynamics and accents are respected, but Muti conducts as though he's never heard of a metronome and with all kinds of interpolated rubatos that you'd only find elsewhere in the types of de Sabata and Panizza performances he spent a career railing against. And yet, unlike Solti, this is a performance by a conductor who knows his Verdi so well that he knows just how much romanticism this approach needs. We would wait for Muti to match his professed seriousness with substance for another thirty years. This is greatness, but it is definitely decadence. 

Chailly/Urmana: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: breaks the scale. 

And then there is Riccardo Chailly's pass at it. Chailly, unlike Muti, didn't need time to evolve. He was always a cold fish, but his musical values were bedrock from the moment he appeared on the scene in his early 20s, as was his utter intolerance for opera's bullshit. Not since Toscanini has there been a conductor who is such a stickler for the urtext. How he gets singers to comply with him is a mystery no one will ever solve, but as with every other piece, there has never been an Aida this thought through. Unlike in, say, Mahler, which has been thought through so many ways that another new approach can elicit groans, Verdi needs this sort of cleaning up badly. No one in recorded history, among those who got good sound at least, has considered so much how crucial certain orchestral lines are and just how they should balance against the voice. Some of the tempos are right on the metronome clicks, others are too slow as has become Chailly's latter-day mein in opera, and Chailly occasionally hews to tradition in manners he never would ten years earlier like slowing up for Aida's first stage entrance or at Amneris's cries of "Ah Vieni" at the beginning of Act II. As ever with Chailly, it is not the complacent slowness of Perlea or the mummified slowness of young Karajan. It is a means to get utter linear clarity and nuanced detailing. You might not like the aesthetic: I vastly prefer Chailly's mien here to what he does in most of the Germans, but even in when you don't like Chailly, he is a maestro among maestri, and this is one of the few truly great performances in the years after Aida's golden age. This isn't melodrama, it's not even romanticism, we hear, finally, Aida's full pyramid from just about all its sides: form, color, line, vocalism, characterization, spectacle, pacing and that indefinable pagan spirituality. Neither melodrama nor complacency here. It would have been nice to get this level of sound and orchestral playing with the singers of fifty years earlier, but finally, hear this, and you basically hear what Aida is.  

And yes... this is the famous production which Alagna left in a huff after getting boo'd after the first aria. Listening to how well he does here, I don't blame him. He is not as subtle as his female co-stars, and is not acting up their storm, but he is acquiting himself as a Radames whose singing is pretty close to magnificent in a century that doesn't have magnificent Radameses. On the other hand, the gods blessed this recording with two absolutely fabulous female leads: great singing actresses with powerful voices and a minimum of warble. Their Act II duet is absolutely electric: dramatic, colorful, characterized in three dimensions. You can hear both the smiles and the insincerity in Ildiko Komlosi's voice just before she erupts in rage. Violetta Urmana suffers as a truly great prima donna does, only to occasionally erupt in joy rather than rage. The only problem is Carlo Guelfi's Amanasro, whose vocal insuitability he conceals by snarling: not the worst solution... This performance, truly, is something to behold. 

Muti/Netrebko: Apollo to Dionysus Meter: 5

But then there is Muti's Salzburg performance in 2017. Forty-three years after the recording, only one bona-fide star in Anna Netrebko (is there more than one bona-fide star in any production anymore?), and otherwise the best Verdi singers you can find in 2017, who a very far cry from what they were in 1974. This is such a different Muti. It's far from perfect: the ego is still there, the departures from the score are all over the place. Muti still contorts Verdi in manners opposite from what he professes whenever it suits him, and yet the knowledge, the affection, the ability to find the right color, or tinta, the perfect Italian sound (sfumato--to use an art term) he gets from the Vienna Philharmonic, it's a miracle unseen in this piece since the days of Toscanini and Gui (his teacher). Perfection is not on the menu, nor supposed to be. Chailly is perfection, old Muti is infinity. He has all Karajan's ability to find the exact right color and balance the instrumental lines against the singers so that the orchestra becomes a participant rather than just an accompanist: but unlike Karajan, the orchestra never dominates. Muti may be the dictator, but he does not demand complete stardom here. This is the sort of late-in-life mastery we only get from conductors who've devoted their life to this music: the way we get that extraordinary aliveness from so many Brucknerians late in life: Blomstedt, Haitink, Wand, Skrowaczewski, Giulini, Jochum, Karajan... this is Muti in Verdi. Even the instruments sound like voices. 

Essential: * means especially so

de Sabata/Cigna '37 for its incredible visceral energy

Panizza/Cigna '37 for its incredible extravagance

Toscanini/Nelli '49 for an idea that is perfect, even if not more *

Gui/Mancini '51 for a near platonic ideal of a performance, if only we heard the orchestra better **

Erede/Tebaldi '52 to show precisely what impact Aida could make when the world knew this opera better than ever before or since. ***

Callas/Barbirolli '53 for a plumbing into Aida's soul *

Kubelik/Rysanek '55 for a ceaselessly warm chamber approach 

Varviso/Nilsson '64 for the most underrated conductor to stand in the opera pit

Mehta/Nilsson '65 for pure spectacle and visceral thrills

Muti/Caballe '74 for pure melodrama 

Levine/Price '84 for Price's last ever opera performance, for the most promising young maestro since 1950 who never delivered, and for a lifetime's experience from a singing actress who for thirty years, WAS Aida 

Chailly/Urmana 2004 for everything Aida is. ***

Muti/Netrebko 2017 for a revival of Verdian style from a master who has learned from this music his whole life. **

I don't want to condescend to Verdi, I've spent too much of my life doing that already, but the populism is part of what's great about him. If people want to say that Verdi is as great as Mozart and Beethoven, they have to play him as seriously as they play Mozart and Beethoven: and how much of Verdi's appeal does that shore?

Other people would disagree with me, but I think Aida is of a different variety from his greatest operas. It was written to be a grand summation of Verdi's career, but Verdi was mining his more populist side in Aida, not the side of great art which he found in Otello, Falstaff, Boccanegra and Boito. In Verdi's greatest operas, he starts with the story and creates music to set the story: that's how we get Rigoletto and Traviata and Otello and Falstaff. But in Don Carlo, one cannot help sensing that he began with the setting, and even moreso in Aida. Everyone talks about how great and dramatic Act III is, but after O Patria Mia I find Act III weak sauce. I feel as though Verdi is just moving through the gears of what an opera is supposed to do before he gets to the next amazing tableauxes in Act IV. Think of Amanasro's music where he disavows Aida. It's basically the Monterone music in Rigoletto.

The right conductor never got there: Karajan II and Gui got close, so of course did Toscanini in his way, and we might wish in this piece for masters as great as Mitropoulos, Fricsay, Giulini, Carlos Kleiber (either Kleiber really...), Franco Ferrara, but I think the truly right conductor for this piece was Guido Cantelli: a conductor with Toscanini's austere inevitability but without his rigidity: a Toscanini who could lower the temperature to warmth, the conductor James Levine threatened to become and never did. This is the recording we're missing and oh the tragedy. In my mind, I hear great singing actors like Franco Corelli, Giulietta Simoniatto, Shirley Verrett late in her career when she switched to soprano, all under the disciplining hand of Guido Cantelli leading the Philharmonia in a performance that's loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet, and formally perfect. The spectacle gets its entire due, but it stays in proportion so it never crowds out the intimacy. Cantelli would stick to Verdi's tempi like Toscanini, but he bends the rhythm 5 or 10 clicks all the time like Gui; he observes the accents without overdoing them the way Muti does in every bar, and he would have all the weight of sound Abbado lacks. 

And yet there is so much about Aida that is art at the top of Parnassus. I don't think it's the usual scenes people say. It's not the triumphal march, and it's not even really the tomb scene (except for the offstage choruses). It's the preparations for battle before Ritorna Vincitor, it's the ritual in praise of P'tah, or the offstage judgement scene. Aida is almost unique among Verdi in how it strives for ceremonial sublimity. You can feel it in the Triumphal March if it's not played as a carnival (good luck...), but even outside the Triumph scene, Aida requires a great chorus. A few Verdi operas require a great chorus, particularly among the early operas, but only Don Carlo requires a chorus to create something that seems anywhere close to this large: as though the scene is set of an entire civilization. As far as 'choral epics' go, it's up there with Boris and Les Troyens, and like in those epics, the chorus is what gives the scenes their vividness. I sometimes feel as though Aida is great in exact proportion to how much he gives the chorus to do, but in order to hear the greatness of Aida's most famous scene, you need an ascetic of the Toscanini/Chailly variety who rein tempos to absolute steadiness so that it doesn't feel like just 'elephants on parade.'