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Rigoletto composer4/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Lucy Crowe, Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican last weekend. With so many people displaced and disparaged, the music goes to the heart of the matter while also speaking powerfully to those who feel politically exiled in our own country. Scored for solo soprano, chorus and orchestra, it explores a subject absolutely fit for today: what it is to long for your homeland. The London Symphony Chorus, back after 18 months of Covid restrictions and yet banished to the upper gallery, sang the Purcell with impressive intensity before tackling the most eagerly anticipated music of the evening, two movements from Julian Anderson’s new work, Exiles. He opened the LSO’s autumn season last week with a celebration of British music, brilliantly splicing Henry Purcell’s daringly emotional 1680 anthem Remember not, Lord, our offences with Michael Tippett’s regal 1962 fanfare Praeludium for Brass, Percussion and Bells. One of the many things we are going to miss about Simon Rattle when he leaves his post as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2023 (to be replaced by Pappano) is his unerring ability to make musical connections, to show us the golden thread that links music across the ages. Fine playing in the pit, particularly at the opening of Act 3, is complemented by incisive singing from the muscular all-male chorus. Elsewhere, however, he has a habit of pulling the tempo around, notably in his love duet with Gilda, but the ever-vigilant Pappano never lets him slide off the rails. The Armenian tenor Liparit Avetisyan, as the Duke, dispatches La donna è mobile with crisp efficiency. She sings Caro nome with an innocence that turns to knowingness, adopting the same posture as the Venus of Urbino as she lies on her bed – a pose neatly picked up later by the wanton Maddalena (an underpowered Ramona Zaharia) as she and Sparafucile (Brindley Sherratt, in tremendous form) plot murder. The Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa, as Gilda, is the star of the evening, silvery-voiced and apparently fragile, and yet steely in her delusion that the satanic Duke really loves her. ![]() Barring one act of gratuitous, singular cruelty, lifted from King Lear and introduced to underline Mears’s concept that the Duke is a dangerous psychopath, this is a remarkably straight production and obviously built to last, replacing David McVicar’s licentious staging, first seen in 2001.Ĭarlos Álvarez in the title role and Lisette Oropesa as Gilda in Rigoletto. They make a solid partnership, producing a performance that serves the music admirably and rarely gets in the way of Verdi’s sweepingly dramatic score. This is director of opera Oliver Mears’s debut production for the Royal Opera, and, surprisingly, it’s the first time that the company’s music director, Antonio Pappano, has conducted Rigoletto in his two decades at Covent Garden. The message is clear: the Duke views women as commodities, whether on canvas or cotton sheets. We know that in real life the 16th-century duke was a noted collector – and that Charles I snapped up several bargains when Mantua hit hard times – but neither of these images were ever in Mantua, or indeed Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Matthew, seen in a subverted tableau as the curtain rises. Later it’s replaced by the Rape of Europa by the same artist. T itian’s seductive Venus of Urbino dominates the opulent court of the rapacious Duke of Mantua in the first act of the Royal Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto. ![]()
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