Rigoletto, Welsh National Opera review - back to what they do best

We were of course lucky to get this new WNO Rigoletto at all. If it weren’t for the fact that, in the end, the company’s wonderful chorus and orchestra couldn’t wait to get back to doing what they do best, and accepted a modest glow of light at the end of the tunnel that would barely have registered on the light meters of most union negotiations, the company could well have been dark for many months, perhaps for good.

Watching and listening to them in this staging by the company’s new co-Director designate, Adele Thomas, it was incredible to think that our noble rulers would take the slightest risk of losing a single one of them in favour of some vague, box-ticking political ideology, as lucidly outlined by Elizabeth Atherton in her First Person piece today. I realise that art on this level of excellence is very hard for the average apparatchik to understand, and that it’s the consequent fear of the unknown that rouses their hostility. But after all they are merely the representatives of the people, who mostly have no such difficulty, as anyone at Saturday’s Rigoletto would have heard from the whooping and cheering that greeted almost every aspect of the performance.In fact it was really no more than an average Saturday night performance for this company, which has just (in order to annoy their reluctant paymasters) won the first Sky Arts opera award for their incomparable production of Britten’s Death in Venice last March. Musically this is a good Rigoletto but by no means a great one. Raffaele Abete, taking over at short notice as Duke of Mantua, is a good young Neapolitan tenor who has this style at his fingertips but perhaps lacks the last degree of warmth in the voice. Soraya Mafi (pictured above with Abete) is a lovely Gilda, very light-voiced, very clever with the embellishments in “Caro nome” which she almost turns into giggles of delight at the thought of her student lover, clean and precise at the top. Daniel Luis de Vicente is a vocally solid Rigoletto, not a specially vivid actor as jester or grieving father, but with a compensating emotional range in the voice. Nathanaël Tavernier is a fine, genuine bass Sparafucile (pictured below on the left).

These performances are ultimately hard to judge in detail because of the problems posed by the production. They start with the costumes and setting, designed by Annemarie Woods. Adele Thomas has theories about debauched courts, thinking especially of Jacobean theatre, and she pulls no punches in presenting this Mantuan version as the nastiest, most repulsively, irredeemably vulgar example of the genre, ugly in all respects, without even any trace of an original elegance that might have been polluted by rampant, perverted sex.

Without caring to dwell on the particular imagery, the semi-topless men, the knickers, the slapstick, the general uncourtly undress, I found much of this concept distracting from the music, and I shouldn’t be surprised if the singers did as well. Some of the costuming is inexplicable. Why, for instance, are Sparafucile, a contract killer, and his sister Maddalena, a prostitute (nicely sung by Alyana Abramova), presented as the King and Queen of France or somewhere? There is a deep point here that I’m missing; but the music, less stupid than me, misses it as well. Abramova’s settings (as well as the shortage of trousers) show signs of forgivable economy. Her basic set is a blank house wall upstage with a line of balcony windows. Fine, if dull. For Sparafucile’s house, exceptionally, she has a little red-papered room, like something out of Pagliacci. But then, for no good reason, Thomas switches back to the house wall for the final duet. Why, since it’s clearly wrong dramaturgically? So that she can shovel on the bewigged, topless, probably still trouserless, courtiers to thumb their noses at poor Rigoletto and his (in this case) not terribly dead daughter.

The din, the excessive movement, the rushing around, the jumping on and off tables – all this gets in the way of the drama. At its worst, in the first scene, it even drowns out the music. Stillness is a greater art that it seems many directors find hard to comprehend. But stand the Welsh Opera Chorus in a line and have them sing Verdi under this conductor, the excellent Pietro Rizzo, and accompanied by this orchestra, and the tears will flow.

• Rigoletto in Cardiff to October 4, then touring to Nov 16
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk