Rigoletto
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
In 1851, depicting the ruling class as so loathsome and superficial meant Verdi struggled to persuade both Italian and imperial censors to allow Rigoletto to go ahead. In 2024 the challenge is much simpler: persuading an audience to connect with the opera’s unlikable hero.
You can do it if you have the right singer. For Irish National Opera’s coproduction with Santa Fe Opera and Opera Zuid, the American baritone Michael Chioldi is that singer. Coupled with a beautiful voice – direct, smooth and expressively flexible – is a stage presence that spans a very wide range of nuance. Chioldi understatedly ensures that we detest Rigoletto, the court jester, who, encouraged by a hideous peanut gallery of baying courtiers, mocks the anguish of men whose daughters or wives have been bedded by the predatory Duke, his employer.
When one of these men curses Rigoletto we agree. Nor do we soften much when Verdi allows him a plaintive soliloquy to deny his agency – Not my fault: the Duke pays me to do it.
But Chioldi also invades us with inner conflict when the tables are turned and Rigoletto’s own daughter, Gilda, the sole source of love and meaning in his life, becomes the Duke’s next conquest. Chioldi deploys subtle powers of gesture, movement and facial expression that intensify the jester’s suffering. Once Rigoletto retrieves Gilda and listens to her account of what happened, for instance, the two sit at opposite ends of the stage in the production’s most emotionally powerful moment. We may not love him, but we certainly feel for him.
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As Gilda, the English soprano Soraya Mafi actually exceeds Chioldi in beauty of voice as she scales with incredible comfort and sweetness Verdi’s unforgiving vocal high-wire act. That said, it’s puzzling that Gilda is styled in a way that counters Mafi’s youthfulness.
In fact this is the least of the issues that badly undermine both the excellent singing – which also comes from the Uzbek tenor Bekhzod Davronov as the Duke – and other successful aspects of the production. What’s at stake is a fairly effective foregrounding of underlying themes such as grotesquerie – via Jean-Jacques Delmotte’s dressing of the courtiers, both in court and at large in the night, and their movement as directed by Nicole Morel – and vulgarity, in Jamie Vartan’s court designs, accentuated by the lighting designer Rick Fisher’s full-stage border of light bulbs, with its gameshow vibe of cheap entertainment.
All this works so well in the opening moments until it is interrupted by the first of several messy and disorienting lapses of musical co-ordination when, on the podium, Fergus Sheil, INO’s artistic director, loses control of the connection between chorus and pit and chaos threatens. Not good enough for a dress rehearsal, let alone opening night.
More destructive even are miscalculations by Julien Chavaz, the production’s director, that create ambiguity regarding the opera’s tone. There are even instances of misplaced audience laughter, including when the courtiers – styled as a mob of comic villains – pour into Gilda’s house at night to abduct her.
Rigoletto is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, December 3rd, Thursday, December 5th, and Saturday, December 7th
