THE GRANDEST OF GRIEFS
Not Renaissance Mantua but New York a century past: smart bars and low dives, gangsters in fedoras. Why not ? In any world might be a lonely jokester, missing his life’s love, protective of a daughter, trapped forever by the expectation that he will be both a jokester and the butt of jokes. There too might be a local duke, duking it out and bagging the best girls. It fits. Always did. For now, five years after Jonathan Miller’s death, and for the fourteenth time since 1982s the great director’s production of Rigoletto is back in town.
And not to be missed. Its Like having Halleys Comet turning up again, a thing of perfection retooled with fresh artists, thrilling and thrillerish: 1950s Little Italy atmospheric in its dark street corners and bright-lit bars, the final storm by the murderous riverbank seeing rubbish blowing under the dim streetlamp.
It is always the most dramatically breathtaking of Verdi operas, lowlife and seduction, loneliness and mockery, yearning and revenge and final youthful sacrifice. The setting gives it immediacy: the great tides of musical emotion carry the tale remorselessly onward in both passion and reflection, never a note wasted. It is of all productions the one which – when seeing a few empty seats and the signs reminding us that under 21s easily get in free – makes me long to dash out into St Martin’s Lane to corral a few idlng, unaware half-term teenagers and drag them in to have their lives changed.
Richard Farnes conducts the great orchestra; Weston Hurt – first UK outing – is a magnificent, wounded Rigoletto, the barman everyone thinks they know and can laugh at, tender in his marvellous duets with Robyn Allegra Parton’s Gilda, a consummate physical actor, showing the outcast’s uneasy restraint and slumping, poleaxed, as he learns of his daughter’s betrayal. Both are first time at the Coliseum, and I hope they love its audience as much as we loved them. Unusually arresting too is Yongzhao Yu, another newcomer here are fresh from the Met, as the Duke, smug in a grey suit in the smart bar of Act 1, lounging in jeans as the “student’ seducing Gilda, throwing out Donna e Mobile (albeit in English, as ever at ENO) as if he’d made it up himself that moment.
And through it all wash the great tides of music, tracking every mood and pain and hope, Verdi never wasting a note; the chorus moments thrill, shaking the great gilded room. Unforgettable. ENO tickets begin at a tenner, which is another sort of miracle.
eno.org. to 21 Nov. Seven more performances. Selling fast, as well it might. Get in!!!
Rating 5
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