Over the years I’ve probably seen seven different productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s 1850 opera, Rigoletto including five at Lyric Opera and my wife has seen at least five. We agreed that Lyric Opera’s new production which we had the pleasure of seeing last night was the best we have ever seen. The reason was clear: the voices. Young Italian soprano Rosa Feola’s Gilda was spectacular. Her combination of the beauty of the instrument, discipline, and interpretation exceeds my ability to come up with superlatives. Her Cara nome was absolutely lovely.
Rigoletto, too, was wonderfully good. We’ve heard baritone Quinn Kelsey many times over the years at Lyric and I must say he’s really grown into these Verdi father roles. His many duets with Rosa Feola were gorgeous.
Matthew Polenzani’s Duke was excellent, too. This uniting of three powerful vocal actors made for the best performance of Rigoletto I’ve ever heard.
The balance of my remarks are in response to a short piece in the program notes in which the author characterized Rigoletto as an overbearing father. In my opinion only a child could take such a position. Rigoletto’s world is one in which the rich and powerful do as they wish while the poor do what they must. It is a world of injustice and cruelty. In other words it’s a world much like our own. Rigoletto’s life is a split one. In his public life he is a fool, constantly subjected to shame, ridicule, and degradation, while his private life is secret and dominated by his daughter who is pure, simple, and virtuous. It is no accident that Rigoletto’s costume is half one color, half another. It is an epitome of Rigoletto himself. His dearest wish is to keep those two worlds separate.
He fails, with tragic consequences. What would have happened had Rigoletto been less protective of his daughter? The tragedy would have occurred sooner. It would not have been avoided.
The Critics
The Tribune’s John Von Rhein concurs with my opinion of this production of Rigoletto:
Operatic Cassandras are forever lamenting that the age of great Verdi vocalism is dead, that there just aren’t enough first-rate voices around to take on the big Verdi works that are the bread and butter of opera companies and that the public is always clamoring to hear.
That may be true in some quarters but not at the Lyric Opera House, where on Saturday night Lyric opened a new-to-Chicago production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto†that carried enough full-throttle vocal incandescence to bring down the house several times and guarantee a crackling good time in the Ardis Krainik Theatre.
Much of the excitement came from a superb performance by the luminous Italian soprano Rosa Feola, making her Lyric debut as Gilda, the virginal daughter of the title character, a bitterly angry jester in the court of the libertine Duke of Mantua. Feola sang ravishingly and acted touchingly as a trusting young naif who casts her lot with her seducer, knowing full well that it will cost her her life. Feola earned herself a thunderous reception, and rightly so.
But the Verdian vocal starpower did not stop there. The elegant, Evanston-born tenor Matthew Polenzani, a longtime Lyric favorite, added to his lengthy list of hometown credits an ardent portrayal of the dashing smooth-talker to whom poor Gilda gives her heart.
Another star alumnus of Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center, baritone Quinn Kelsey, brought his powerfully sung Rigoletto to town for the first time.
So did the Sun-Times’s Hedy Weiss:
Giuseppe Verdi is the Shakespeare of Italian opera. And while “Rigoletto†— unquestionably one of his greatest works — has a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave that is based on a play by Victor Hugo, it was Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,†with its themes of a man who is both taunted and taunting, whose fierce desire to protect his daughter is his undoing, and whose quest for revenge ends in tragedy, that came to mind most often Saturday as Lyric Opera of Chicago raised the curtain on its altogether dazzling production of “Rigoletto.â€
Driven by a perfect storm of glorious singing, superb acting and stunning design, the performance was met by the sort of extended ovation not often heard these days. And it deserved every bravo that echoed through the audience.
