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 in this presentation).
Rigoletto is the Duke’s jester, and therefore his Mr Fixit,
all-powerful despite his comic garb. Here Daniel Luis de Vicente is given the
garb of a drayman, shambling around without the charisma of his privileged
station, and therefore totally devoid of any sympathy evinced when we witness
his despair at the seduction and destruction of his cherished daughter, Gilda.
Hers is the only engrossing portrayal in this sorry farrago,
Soraya Mafi vulnerable (even despite her suggestive directorial movements at
her first appearance) yet commanding in her jewel-like vocal accuracy.
The small yet crucial parts of the assassin Sparafucile and
his victim-bait sister Maddalena were well-taken by the sonorous and physically
commanding Nathanael Tavernier and Alyona Abramova, both incongruously dressed
in a costume design which just seemed to have thrown charity-shop castoffs at
the performers.
Raffaele Abete was a Duke lacking in charisma both
visually and vocally, he and de Vicente indulging in too much extraneous
stage-business to remind us how great is the vocal quartet “Bella figlia dell’
amore” as the denouement approaches.
Pietro Rizzo’s leaden conducting did nothing to lift the understandable
depression of the excellent WNO Chorus and Orchestra under the current
ridiculous Arts Council threats, and actually I couldn’t wait for the curtain
to come down.
And Verdi doesn’t help. When Rigoletto, having paid
Sparafucile to murder the Duke, instead finds Gilda in the assassin’s sack, and
hears the Duke warbling “La donna e mobile" offstage, the opera should have
ended there, with a few huge, terrifying chords. Oh. no; we get an
interminable, maudlin duet about Gilda praying in heaven for her father’s
redemption, until at last she snuffs it. To see how such a situation should be
handled, check out Puccini’s Suor Angelica.
Christopher Morley