Discovery of perfection: Rigoletto at the ROH
Rigoletto
The Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Amphitheatre A76, staff gift
6 January 2018
ROH page
Rigoletto usually induces in me feeling of confusion, boredom or even anger. I have a host of arguments I usually trot out to defend this aversion. They’re all, though, made a nonsense by this performance, which I adored. Rigoletto leapt from operatic mystery to perhaps the most perfect opera, in an effect that may be temporary but is great while it lasts.
The transformation is certainly not due to David McVicar’s production, which I still dislike. The hard-headed determination not to flinch from the horrible implications of Hugo’s story is excessive, uncomfortably forcing the audience’s complicity in the Duke’s debauchery. The outrageously lengthy scene change in Act I is a criminal disruptor to the narrative flow. And yet in the glow of my new-found Rigoletto-love, I can admire its merits. The single set (minus the glacial rotation) is sensible. Almost all the action takes place in the middle of the front of the stage.
I think the real transformation, though, is due to hearing Lucy Crowe as Gilda from the Amphitheatre. There could not have been a better way to experience Crowe’s continued marvellous development. Her voice is so incredibly loud; Michael Fabiano and Dimitri Platanias, each punchy singers even verging on shouty, sounded as solitary voices within the auditorium-filling aura of Crowe’s resonance. She, even more than the orchestra, seemed to be the medium through which the opera moved. Add to this omnipresence her highly unusual tone, which in the context of Gilda assumed a ghostly quality wreathed in cemetery airs, every note foretelling her tragic end. I was in pieces.
Platanias was very good, in a much more conventional way. I’ve previously found him a somewhat indifferent actor but Rigoletto seems to be close to his heart: there was a gentle tenderness to his expression of the character’s fatal flaw, a heartbreaking context for Crowe’s deathly potency. Fabiano, as in Bohème a few months ago, pushes his lovely voice into an ugly coarseness, but that’s not such a bad thing for the Duke. His final statement of ‘La donna è mobile’, absurdly jaunty as Platanias subtly indicated Rigoletto already foresees the the terrible discovery he is about to make, was a perfect expression in this magnificent final act, even without the mystery of Crowe’s astonishing voice.
Post scriptum
The love didn’t last (16 January, Stalls Circle Standing D52, £13). Even with the same cast my overriding sense was once again of the opera’s oddness; instead of deathly inevitability the familiar strangeness of Verdi’s experimental, academic approach to the opera’s miserable tragedy. Platanias was even better this time, though (or from this position), signing with a technical steeliness that to hear is to do the soul good.
No comments yet.