Wonderful singing, mad setting...
Only one Opera Holland Park production to see this year, Verdi’s Rigoletto, and it lives up (or down) to expectations.
Opera Holland Park is, in my experience, noted by having excellent musicians and singers (and no exception here) and frequently completely mad mise-en-scènes – and again, no real exception here.
The action is moved from the 19th century Mantua dominated by a philandering Duke and his aristocratic bully boys to 1920s (probably) Oxford, where the Duke and his cronies become The Bullingdon (or a good facsimile thereof) – and Rigoletto no longer a hunchbacked jester but (possibly) a Proctor’s Bulldog and certainly a wounded and decorated WW1 veteran, with a leg brace.
Unfortunately, to set the 1920s scene, the opera opens with an invented scene of Bullingdon bullying and an initiation (into the Bullingdon) set to loud 1920s jazz/ dance music, still blaring from a gramophone as the ‘real’ opera starts – and drowning out the opening bars of Verdi and the opening lines of the chorus.
There is a lot of additional activity (including a second set of dumb-show action played up stage right and un-linked to the main story) to allow the always endearing Opera Holland Park Chorus a bit of stage time. They do, at least, emphasize the louche-ness of the 1920s students!
What is not to be queried however is the quality of the singing and particularly Alison Langer as Gilda hitting notes which thrilled, Alessandro Scotto di Luzio as the Duke – whose key duet with Gilda is very moving (and whose ‘La donna è mobile’ is rousing) – and Stephen Gadd is an exemplary Rigoletto.
Did the transposition to Oxford work? Well, Jonathan Miller did of course update Rigoletto as well, to a 1950s New York Mafia family, but at least that kept the Italian flavour (and available assassins for hire were at least more plausible in that milieu). But, with the singing we had, in the end, it didn’t matter.
But do remember, this is not a feel-good opera, and it is (slightly) weird in this staging.