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‘Agility and fragility’: Sydney Mancasola as Gilda in Rigoletto at the Coliseum.
‘Agility and fragility’: Sydney Mancasola as Gilda in Rigoletto at the Coliseum. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
‘Agility and fragility’: Sydney Mancasola as Gilda in Rigoletto at the Coliseum. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Rigoletto; Philip Glass at 80 – review

This article is more than 7 years old

Coliseum; Barbican, London
ENO returns to Jonathan Miller’s classic production. Plus, wall-to-wall Glass

The jukebox is back. And with it the lonely bar, the trench coats, brogues, pocket squares and pinky rings. Jonathan Miller’s 1982 “mafioso” staging of Verdi’s Rigoletto, thought dead but merely sleeping, has returned to open English National Opera’s 2017 season. Richard Armstrong conducts a new cast, staged by revival director Elaine Tyler-Hall. Miller was there to take his curtain call, with many in the opening-night crowd leaping to their feet to cheer him. If not everything went smoothly in the performance, the production and its begetter deserved the cheers.

It was laid to rest in 2010 after a dozen revivals. The radical updating to gangster-Godfather New York felt jaded. Miller was out of fashion too. A replacement Rigoletto from Chicago, directed by Christopher Alden and set in a 19th-century gentlemen’s club, made a brief and none too successful appearance in 2014. In a risky about-turn, and with a change of regime, Miller’s staging is now being held up as symbol, and perhaps beacon, of ENO at its best: a production that revolutionised opera, preparing the way for Nicholas Hytner, David Alden, Calixto Bieito, Barrie Kosky and more. (Its significance is discussed in the latest ENO Overture Opera Guide, devoted to Rigoletto and published this week.)

There’s no mystery about the production’s restoration. This season is ENO’s toughest and thinnest, as the company steadies its multiple turmoils. Here’s a show that stands a chance of success. It speaks to anyone. In Rosemary Vercoe and Patrick Roberston’s impeccable Little Italy designs, it still looks stylish. It tells the Victor Hugo story – simple in precis, strangely complicated in detail – with clarity and punch. Verdi’s score is an unstoppable sequence of miraculous hits, whether solo, duet or ensemble. It astounds on each fresh hearing – just as well given this was a lengthy evening, in many respects greatly enjoyable but with many ifs and buts.

Joshua Guerrero (centre) as the Duke with members of the ENO Chorus in Rigoletto. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

This is a rugged, abrasive score. A degree of roughness is built into it. Yet Armstrong’s pace was often at odds with the singers, who strained both to keep up and slow down in this lurching ride. A cautious, in memory unprecedented, press note explained that “as part of [Armstrong’s] interpretation these performances are being performed uncut and with no interpolated high notes” – in non-jargon speak, every note was played and singers were not allowed, as has become the tradition in Italian opera, to show off those expected high notes which do not appear in Verdi’s score. Hard to know from the outside quite what the battles were, or who won, but you could hear them.

Making a striking ENO debut, the California soprano Sydney Mancasola combined agility and fragility as Gilda. Joshua Guerrero, some intonation problems aside, made a convincing snakish Duke. Nicholas Pallesen, singing the title role for the first time, has the makings of an affecting hunchback-jester, lyrical in tone despite some first-night unevenness. Barnaby Rea, Nicholas Folwell and Madeleine Shaw were effective as that gruesome trio, Sparafucile, Monterone and Maddalena. The chorus, with so many classic Verdian big moments, were full-blooded and energetic, especially the men, ever lurking in the downtown shadows. After a smudgy start the orchestral playing, in a work with so many solos and atmospheric effects, settled into its characteristic high quality. Not a vintage performance maybe, but a vintage Rigoletto to touch and chill. Don’t let these reservations deter you: Verdi still triumphs.

As part of its all-American big-birthdays extravaganza – Steve Reich’s 80th has been, John Adams’s 70th follows this month – the Barbican devoted a weekend to the music of Philip Glass at 80. Choral and symphonic music sat alongside ballet and film, including the recent score – played live by the ever game BBC Symphony Orchestra – for Godfrey Reggio’s severe, beautiful and monochrome Visitors. In short, or in the film’s case, quite long, we are all doomed, including the gorgeous, unblinking female gorilla from the Bronx zoo making her screen debut. Glass and Reggio first collaborated in the Qatsi trilogy. The composer’s elegiac score, rich with viola, cello and brass refrains, actually reined in the longueurs of Visitors. Incredible but true. The BBC Singers tackled, with aplomb, the prestissimo repetitions and variations of Knee Play 3 from Einstein on the Beach (1975-6). Marin Alsop, who as a young violinist played in Glass’s ensemble, conducted the BBCSO in the UK premiere of Double Concerto for two Pianos and Orchestra, written for and performed by Katia and Marielle Labèque.

Katia (left) and Marielle Labèque performing the UK premiere of Philip Glass’s Double Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop at the Barbican. Photograph: Mark Allan

This work tumbles into agitated life with romantic and jazzy figurations and harmonic invention, the tendency of Glass’s later style, and ends hushed and peacefully. Soloists are absorbed into the texture. It’s attractive, but the work’s mood of spaced-out nonchalance touched on excess. Speaking of which, Radio 3 joined in with a Glass all-nighter, featuring a complete performance of the marathon Music in Twelve Parts, that pivotal work of the 1970s. Life has a tendency to intrude, so I heard it (on replay) in rather more parts, this necessarily episodic journey maddening as well as beguiling. As Glass says, you don’t have to listen. I don’t know why I do but I do.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Rigoletto
★★★
Philip Glass at 80 weekend ★★★★

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