Trio Triumphs

Robert Driver's current Opera Company production is comfortingly traditional.

by David Shengold

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Published: Oct 10, 2007

In Europe these days, Rigoletto — Verdi's classic drama of misfired vengeance against a callous aristocratic seducer — is keen for reinterpretation. The real lollapalooza is Munich's, where the singers wear Planet of the Apes costumes. Robert Driver's current Opera Company production is comfortingly traditional, with some perfunctory "decorative" dancing but otherwise good use of space and action. This is an opera and a staging that someone with zero previous knowledge of the art form could enjoy. The essential love scenes (father/daughter and devious player/innocent babe) are convincing, and Paul Shortt's spare sets solve the plot's eavesdropping requirements. It's too bad the first scenery change is so lengthy as to dispel the tension between the first two scenes.

The three leads, all making local debuts, are as a fine a trio as you're likely to hear in Rigoletto today. Veteran British baritone Alan Opie doesn't possess an oaken Italianate sound, but he's a complete artist, limning the titular jester's rage and pride and fashioning sound musical phrases, and, as the evening progresses, taking more of the traditional high options. Matthew Polenzani, a splendid musician, handles the italianità, charting the Duke's seductiveness in dynamically varied singing that evokes two honey-voiced tenor ghosts of the Academy's legendary past, Ferruccio Tagliavini and Alain Vanzo. Lovely twentysomething Israeli soprano Chen Reiss wows the crowd with a movingly acted Gilda etched in jaw-dropping crystalline flights. At the Oct. 7 performance, the three won vociferous standing ovations.

The only relative blot is Falstaffian Julian Rodescu as knife-for-hire Sparafucile, commanding weighty low notes but emitting crudely produced, short-breathed nasal vocalism. Kirk Eichelberger, a tall, lithe bass a notch low for the vengeful Monterone, would look more credible both as an assassin and as brother to the luscious — visually and audibly — Maddalena of Kirstin Chavéz. The small roles are in capable (largely Curtis-trained) hands and throats, the standouts being Dimitrie Lazich's unusually mellow-sounding and complex Marullo and the rich-toned Giovanna of Allison Sanders.

(d_shengold@citypaper.net)

Rigoletto, Through Oct. 17, Opera Company of Philadelphia at the Academy of Music, 240 S. Broad St., 215-893-1018, www.operaphilly.com

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