OPERA REVIEW: RIGOLETTO
30 SEPT/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 4/5


TORONTO - As a showbiz veteran, the Canadian Opera Company’s Alexander Neef clearly recognizes that it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. And having embraced that notion, he’s apparently gone on to embrace the notion that if pleasing everyone is out of the question, garnering a passionate reaction from everyone will work just about as well.

Which is precisely why, one suspects, he has engaged director Christopher Alden to mount a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s RIGOLETTO, which took to the stage of the Four Seasons on Thursday. Alden, you may recall, is the director behind the COC’s love-it-or-hate-it take on The Flying Dutchman, wherein everyone seems to be suffering from a frightful case of debilitating mal de mer. Judging from the audience reaction when Alden took his bows on opening night, this RIGOLETTO is destined to garner the same range of reactions.

Based on Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, RIGOLETTO tells the story of a hunchback jester of that name, in the court of the corrupt Duke Of Mantua. But even while Rigoletto seemingly embraces his Duke’s wastreling ways, he’s trying to protect the innocence of his motherless young daughter, Gilda, by forcing her into an all but cloistered existence. Despite his best efforts, Rigoletto’s two worlds collide with — this being opera — tragic results for daddy, and even more tragic results for his beloved daughter.

On the plus side, this production is nothing short of a musical feast, featuring a cast led by Quinn Kelsey, a magnificently expressive baritone with a face and a voice made for tragedy, sharing the title role with Lester Lynch throughout the run. There’s also impressive work from tenor Dmitri Pittas, cast as the scandalous and licentious Duke (David Lomeli shares that role). And if soprano Ekaterina Sadovnikova lacks the power in the upper ranges to make a truly impressive Gilda, a role she shares with Simone Osborne, she nonetheless packs maximum innocence and pathos into her performance.

But even though the COC Orchestra, under the increasingly assured direction of Johannes Debus, leads the opera’s singers and an impressive supporting cast through Verdi’s glorious score with sure-footed ease, this is a production that seems destined to leave a lot of patrons bemused.

For even while it is all but impossible not to embrace the beauty of Michael Levine’s set — an evocation of a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club, complete with wood panelling and coffered ceiling — it is a setting that does little or nothing to evoke the Renaissance era in which the tale is set. The intention, one suspects, is to underline the fact that in a closed little world where women and people such as Rigoletto are consigned forever to the fringes, to be used and abused at will, tragedy is more or less inevitable. But that has always been apparent in the telling of this tale.

In limiting the action to the locale of the Ducal court — or nightmarish versions thereof — and ignoring Rigoletto’s attempts to create an oasis away from it, Alden strips the story of much of its shading, dimming the horror of the violation of his tragic hero’s sanctuary and the ultimate tragedy of his loss.

In short, Alden seems to have created another opera aimed squarely at those who see opera as an entertainment from the neck up. As for those who want it to be an experience that touches the heart as well, one suspects they were the audience members who booed even while they applauded, when Alden joined the line-up at the opening-night curtain call. But, as Neef has surely noticed, there was hardly anyone who wasn’t engaged.