Midlands Classical Music Making

  IL TRITTICO                           Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff *****   Two days, two shows, same company, but what a gulf of difference in impact! Unlike Verdi’s tub-thumping Rigoletto, easily run through, Puccini’s Il Trittico is an absolute masterpiece, little-known in its entirety because of the obvious difficulties of staging three very different operas during the course of a single evening. And that is actually one of its strengths: taken in as a whole, the structure is nothing less than an operatic symphony, Il Tabarro brooding and weighty as an opening movement, Suor Angelica reflective and soul-searching as a slow movement, and Gianni Schicchi an exuberant scherzo-finale. In the hands of such a sympathetic conductor as Alexander Joel this overview really works, and this joint staging by Scottish Opera and WNO packs a huge punch under the astute direction of David McVicar. The superb designs – Charles Edwards’ intricate sets so telling

                                             RIGOLETTO                              Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ** Verdi’s Rigoletto certainly has its faults (more of that later), but it certainly doesn’t deserve this shambolic new production from one of the world’s great opera companies. Director Adele Thomas seems to have conceived the tragedy as a vehicle for a surreal send-up of the genre itself. We begin with the nowadays obligatory pre-music curtain-raiser, an adolescent orgy featuring prizefighters knocking each other senseless, an amused crowd of nobles spectating from an upper gallery, and a flock of hoorays of indeterminate gender bringing their nocturnal emissions to life. Amidst all this farrago important detail goes for nothing: the affair between the Duke of Mantua and Countess Ceprano, and far more importantly, the curse inflicted upon Rigoletto by Monterone (Paul Carey Jones, one of a small handful of voices deserving of commendation