In the Canadian Opera Company’s cerebrally insistent production of Rigoletto, now at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, Quinn Kelsey in the title role asserts a commanding physical presence and a dynamic voice. Be he mean or gentle or haunted, this Rigoletto sings with bottomless resonance and an inherent sense of drama as he conjures subtle shapes of meaning in his sound. When malicious, as with Ceprano in Act I, he sneeringly twists his words, with a baritone that is piercing, like a blade. With Sparafucile the assassin he is ominous and later, before his tormentors, his impotence proves heartbreaking. Dramatically and musically, we sense a carefully realized musical intelligence in Kelsey’s conception.
Ekaterina Sadovnikova’s Gilda conveys an air of openness, innocence, and vulnerability. Hers is a sometimes meaty full bodied delicacy and she easily slides into intimate shadings or dramatic frenzies. She negotiates her coloratura with some agility, richly textured sensitivity, and incisive placement of dramatic effect. Her soprano provides a beautifully unforced and unaffected display of pleasing voice. David Lomeli’s Duke sings with a ringing edge to his tenor and spontaneously blends musicality with dramatic smarts. His is a voice of richness and flexibility and like the other soloists he does leaps and runs of scales with ease that allow the music to serve both characterization and the narrative. As the Duke he is bluntly self-satisfied, he is a most unpleasing fellow, as he should be.
In an excellent supporting cast of briefer but striking moments, mezzo Kendall Gladen gives a variety of human shadings and distinct sexiness to Maddalena, while Phillip Ens as Sparafucile is rich with threatening darkness in both voice and presence. Another fresh touch involves Gilda’s maid, Giovanna, in the person of Megan Latham, having the hots for the ever ready Duke. The chorus, fully present in body and voice, certainly creates a strongly challenging environment, thus adding to the atmosphere of tension throughout.
The orchestra under Johannes Debus is distinctly supportive of the each singer’s musical intentions and incisively present in dramatic details. When required, Debus is quite adept in the creation of intense Verdian atmosphere or narrative momentum or lyrical emotional colorations to support these singers. When seen from an elevated position, the too large setting of a men’s club, by Michael Levine, is very deep, almost with the expanse of an open range. It is a beautiful setting, however, especially with the acute and evocative lighting of Duane Schuler, of rich wood surfaces, carpets, and elegantly carved chairs and tables, plus a working fireplace. We are definitely in the presence of longstanding wealth. This is a very big and dwarfing space.
The production’s main and quite undermining flaw is that the director, Christopher Alden, is consistently obsessed with the imposition of concept to the detriment of Verdi’s inherently theatrical masterpiece. He constantly strives for dramatic impression and overdoes each opportunity for visual impact to the point of overstatement and sometimes of cliché. The heavy handed visual effects definitely undercut the inherent drama and sometimes the very music in Verdi’s opera. The director always distracts us, always forces us to analyze his effect, always grandly makes points already made in the opera as it is. Sometimes in this production the symbolic becomes almost silly.
The opera’s action, although it requires Rigoletto to escape home to his sanctuary with Gilda, and away from the cruel world and his cruel self in it, all takes place in the duke’s court –or is it in Rigoletto’s mind?- here a Victorian men’s club. Alden likes to make bold arrangement of bodies, likes to have used women strewn upon the floor to prove this a cruelly patriarchal culture, likes the opera’s characters stationed at the ends of the stage’s vast expanse in a drama-diluting fashion. He chooses to have Rigoletto exiled for seemingly long stretches on a chair downstage and remote from the action, opts for the lilting Questa o quella to be delivered by the immobile duke sitting with his smoking and brandy sipping cronies. His bizarre staging includes a maid who walks slowly and ritualistically from up left to down center and it is a very long walk. The director messes around with explicit dramatic potential and Cara None is sung with competing distraction upstage. Did I mention that the onstage lynching of Monterone in the club?
After the abduction we have bodies, some partially dressed, strewn all over the men’s club in disarray and the mother’s portrait is now slashed, no doubt symbolically. When the duke states that for Gilda he would change his ways, he takes a substantial swig from a bottle and no doubt we get the point that he is a hypocrite. As Rigoletto passively sits at the fire with his back to the proceedings, of all things, the men of the club surround the couch upon which the duke does what he does best with Gilda. Yes, Rigoletto can do nothing, we are told visually, but we already know that. When Gilda’s last breath comes, strangely again in the same setting, she does not just die but she wanders off to an open door upstage with blinding light before her making her into an angelic silhouette. Effective, certainly, but also unnecessary and clichéd.
We are constantly made aware that this is the director’s gig but, of course, it proves repeatedly absurd to try to make the most theatrical of composers more theatrical. Verdi has a censor-defying and humanly dramatic tale already set up and Alden seems intent on messing it up. As for meanings, one very soon feels nudge-nudged to death with points already made by composer and his libretto. If all this sounds like a clutter of devices, it sometimes is. In Verdi the drama is direct and the criticism of royalty and sexism are quite explicit, but here, under guise of making a statement, the director constantly forces us away from Verdi in order to decipher his directorial devices. There is so much here, granted, that is interesting to watch and experience, and much beauty of setting to behold, but unfortunately there is much that is unnecessarily distracting and self-indulgent.
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