Wednesday May 1, 2013 - I really felt no desire to see The Met's new 'Vegas' RIGOLETTO but since my friend Lisette Oropesa was singing Gilda in this late-season run of performances, I knew I'd want to be there. So, a score desk was the answer. You can sit up in the heights with your illuminated score and imagine any kind of staging you want. It's the music that counts.
Back in 1962, at the Cincinnati Zoo Opera, RIGOLETTO was the first opera I ever saw live. I was fourteen years old and had been in love with opera since watching Renata Tebaldi singing excerpts from MADAMA BUTTERFLY on the Bell Telephone Opera in 1959. My parents very kindly arranged our annual summer vacation around the Zoo Opera's schedule and so after three seemingly endless years when my passion was sustained by recordings and the Texaco/Met broadcasts, I was finally able to experience opera live. The principal singers were Nadja Witkowska (replacing Laurel Hurley), Barry Morell and Frank Guarrera. The sets were a bit card-boardish but I didn't care. And I can still clearly recall the vivid singing and acting of Andrea Velis as Borsa: the beginning of my continuing interest in the art of the comprimario.
Fast-forward across the decades to tonight: RIGOLETTO is an opera I know word-for-word and note-for-note. I really didn't need the score, but what else can you do with a score desk?
Both the printed synopsis in the Playbill and the Met Titles were altered to suit to Las Vegas/1960s setting of the current production, leading me to wonder why they didn't just sing it in English, with a newly-commissioned translation. I seriously doubt that Don Rickles (the famed Vegas insult-comic known as "The Merchant of Venom" and on whom the character of Rigoletto in this production is rumored to be based) went around speaking Italian all day. Monterone is for some reason depicted as an Arab, and the hit-man Sparafucile still describes himself (in Italian) as being "from Burgundy"...he's certainly a long way from home in this show. If you think about it, none of the production makes any sense. But then, why should it? I had one glimpse at the sets during the final bows: the 'seedy nightclub outside Vegas' seemed to have been a dumping site for huge vats of blueberry pie filling.
Of course none of this matters in the long run; in a few years this production will seem just as dated and dull as everything else and it will be replaced by something different: perhaps a Kabuki RIGOLETTO or one set in Nazi Germany; heaven forbid it should be set in Mantua.
Marco Armiliato led an efficient performance, sometimes swamping the singers. His tempi seemed right (though a bit fast at times) and he allowed the singers some latitude for vocal expressiveness. It's funny how certain unwritten high notes are accepted without question (the high-B at the end of "La donna e mobile") while other once-expected options (a D-flat for Gilda to end the Quartet) are now banned in the interest of come scritto.
I should probably recuse myself from writing about Lisette Oropesa's Gilda because of our friendship; but there's no need to, really, because the entire audience seemed to agree with me that she gave the evening's finest singing. Her '"Caro nome" was exquisite, a perfectly lovely arc of tonal radiance and dynamic nuance, climaxing with an incredible trill. All evening the soprano produced one beautiful phrase after another, with impeccable musicianship and with the character's vulnerability and ultimate resolve finely delineated in both the words and the colours of the voice.
Vittorio Grigolo (once known as 'Il Divo') has such vocal ping that I thought continually he was being miked; but it seems that's just his natural sound. It's a pleasing voice, with many expressive modulations of volume and with the persuasive phrasing and diction of a native Italian. The highest notes seemed ever-so-slightly clouded; he didn't milk them like some of his predecessors in the role. As Rigoletto, George Gagnidze could sing powerfully one moment and with hushed introspection the next. He gave a thoroughly satisfying vocal performance, pulling off some striking top notes where his voice seemed to go into a different gear. Both Grigolo and Gagnidze sounded especially fine harmonizing with Lisette's pretty sound; there were some lovely, long-tapered sustained notes in the duets. Mezzo-soprano Nancy Fabiola Herrera added the fourth voice to the famous Quartet; she sounded wonderful, and I wish she was at The Met more frequently.
As Sparafucile, basso Enrico Giusepe Iori showed off his sustained low-F in Act I and was really good in Act III. Theodora Hanslowe (Giovanna), Jeff Mattsey (Marullo), David Crawford (Ceprano) and Earle Patriarco (Guard) are names familiar to all opera-lovers; they joined newer-comers Alexander Lewis (Borsa), Wallis Giunta (Countess Ceprano), Robert Pomakov (Monterone) and Catherine Choi (Page) to fill out this evening of well-characterized singing.
The two intermissions were each longer than the act they book-ended, so debilitating in their stifling of the opera's dramatic continuity. A cellphone during "Caro nome" and talking from the lighting bay high above during in Act III marred the evening. But despite the odds, it was Verdi who hit the jackpot.
Metropolitan Opera House
May 1, 2013
RIGOLETTO
Giuseppe Verdi
Rigoletto...............George Gagnidze
Gilda...................Lisette Oropesa
Duke of Mantua..........Vittorio Grigolo
Maddalena...............Nancy Fabiola Herrera
Sparafucile.............Enrico Giuseppe Iori
Monterone...............Robert Pomakov
Borsa...................Alexander Lewis
Marullo.................Jeff Mattsey
Count Ceprano...........David Crawford
Countess Ceprano........Wallis Giunta
Giovanna................Theodora Hanslowe
Page....................Catherine Choi
Guard...................Earle Patriarco
Conductor...............Marco Armiliato
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