CINEMA Screening: Rigoletto, Verdi: Metropolitan Opera / Rustioni 29/1/22

Director – Bartlett Sher; Designer Michael Yeargan; Quinn Kelsey, Rigoletto; Rosa Feola, Gilda; Piotr Beczała, Duke of Mantua; Sparafucile, Andrea Mastroni;  conductor Daniele Rustioni

This is the first cinema screening from the Met or ROHCG I’ve been to since the start of the pandemic. The last one was a Met performance of Handel’s Agrippina in January 2020. It was lovely to be back in the Curzon in Sheffield, gin and tonic in hand, watching the show, and I find these events really quite exciting – they give a very good sense of a live performance and have some excellent interviews and backstage images

‘Rigoletto’ is one of those operas you can’t do much with, in terms of directoral input – it’s fast moving, with 3 vividly-drawn characters, and your main job as a director is to make it exciting and  dramatic, so that it grips you and doesn’t drag. (although Opera North’s recent new production does seem to have done something different and exciting – but I am afraid the thought of 3 Rigolettos in a single season is more than I can bear. On the whole in this live screening the director achieved a degree of engagement, though the cameras went in relentlessly for close ups and there wasn’t a clear sense of how the crowds were being managed in the scenes where they were present. However, for some not very clear reason, the production team decided to frame the work within the context of the Weimar Republic. This really contributed nothing to the evening – for a start, it would have been preposterous in that context to have so many of the aristocratic, military types we saw on stage. Although the designer got to create some nice art deco sets, there was nothing otherwise Weimar-ish about the production beyond ‘flapper’ wigs and clothes, as  well as a few blokes in leather jackets and coats. The director referred to proto-fascism on stage, in an interval interview, but this didn’t really come across in any meaningful way in what I saw. The sets were massive and looked far too large for the human dramas which they over-arched.

I thought Rosa Feola was an excellent Gilda – maybe not in the Oropesa class, (see October review) but with a very effective stage presence and lots of beautiful singing. She was particularly good in the 3 and 4^th act, in seeming credible in both her sense of loss of, and continued love for, the Duke. Piotr Beczała got off to a slightly strained start but thereafter sounded splendid, in full control, if with not always very shaded or nuanced phrasing – but maybe that is OK for someone who is not a very sensitive individual. Beczala was not a particularly convincing actor – other than in conveying a degree of smugness, but, again, maybe that is right for this role…… Quinn Kelsey as Rigoletto was, I thought, excellent – some sympathetically warm singing, and , critically, not overdoing it in terms of his acting. There was a brilliant cameo from Andrea Mastroni who looked the epitome of evil as Sparafucile! Daniele Rustioni conducted vigorously and pushed the drama along with the right degree of briskness