NZ Opera presents a deeper Rigoletto

By WILLIAM DART

New Zealand Opera is rehearsing its new production of Rigoletto in what used to be the rock venue, the Powerstation, a shell of a place at the top of Mt Eden Rd, where the Mutton Birds once shared the stage with a Highland Pipe Band.

Director Matthew Richardson is blocking Michael Lewis (who plays Rigoletto), and Maria Costanza Nocentini (Gilda) through their big first-act duet.

Lewis is wearing an orthotic hump under his T-shirt and singing in full, thrilling voice, Nocentini more cautiously marking her part.

Richardson, the man responsible for last year's brilliant Boris Godunov, comes up with suggestions that are specific and focused, and the singers respond enthusiastically.

I'm not surprised, when I talk with him, that Verdi, Mussorgsky, Janacek and Mozart are well up on his list of favourites when it comes to operatic composers.

"Being Italian," Richardson says, "Verdi is not afraid of a musical form which has a direct emotional basis, and he has the dramaturgical understanding and greater skill to be able to confront that."

Rigoletto, one of the three operas of what Richardson describes as Verdi's "middle-hot period", shows a composer still able to trust his instincts.

The central character of Rigoletto is the key to the piece. "One side of the man is the bitter court jester," explains Richardson, "the other is the obsessive and possessive father who tries to protect his daughter from being corrupted by the outside world he despises."

This conflict is carried through into his concept of the production. Richardson has worked for a balance between the opera's exterior and interior worlds, and the celebrated Quartet will be sung with two characters inside the tavern and two outside, neatly pitting the Duke's sexual passions against Rigoletto's desire for vengeance.

All is not as it seems, and disguises are important to the narrative.

"The Duke takes on various disguises, so he's not always the person he seems to be," Richardson says.

"Reality becomes very tenuous, whatever reality might be."

Familiar arias, too, can have a double edge. While La donna e mobile has proved a catchy tune for the production's television marketing, "it is a mark of Verdi's fine sense of irony that he gives such a light, charming melody to a character who is talking about the fickleness of women, when he himself is such an easy-come, easy-go person".

Then there's Caro nome, in which Gilda sings of the joys of first love - "but it's all based on a lover's name that's a complete lie. It's a seductive piece of music, but it's seducing you to fool you."

Richardson's cast includes Australians Rosario La Spina and Stephen Bennett completing the quartet of leads as the Duke and Sparafucile.

Some will remember Bennett as a miracle of malevolence in last year's Acis and Galatea. And, with so much of the work dependent on duets, "there's nowhere to hide. You can't just wheel on a bit of scenery or have the chorus on to distract, you have to rely on two people interacting with one another."

Talking scenery, just how does one create this twilight world in which you are as likely to run into an assassin for hire as receive an invitation to one of the Duke's orgies?

"It's not a dignified world, but rather squalid, and everyone has to take on certain attitudes to survive," says Richardson.

While recent productions have presented Rigoletto as opera mafioso, Richardson wants to reflect the piece's deeper themes. Jon Morrell's sparse set will be "suggestive of the changing of spaces rather than realistic. It is one of Verdi's shorter operas and moves with incredible momentum and we don't want to wait for scene changes.

"There's fluidity, even within a scene, as you see it from outside and inside, perfect for catching a slightly unstable world in which nothing is ever quite fixed or nailed down."

Richardson may have paid his dues with Charles Marowitz' Open Space Theatre in the 70s and Scottish Opera in the 80s, but his first break came when he left school to become a technician at Auckland's Mercury Theatre, where his father Tony was director.

"Everybody was quite young back then [the mid-60s], and we did everything with an instruction book in one hand while inventing with the other.

"You just wouldn't get those opportunities in Europe, where you have to climb a much slower, hierarchical ladder.

"And it's much the same with New Zealand Opera. What may be lacking in certain areas of experience are more than compensated for by commitment, enthusiasm and basic Kiwi, can-do attitude."

Performance

* Who: New Zealand Opera

* What: Rigoletto

* Where and when: Aotea Centre, May 27, 29, 31, June 2, 4