Teatro Regio di Parma in Beijing

Teatro Regio di Parma, together with the National Centre for the Performing Arts, staged a stunning production of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto this week, during Beijing's Opera Festival. In the early afternoon before Thursday's premiere, Beijing was darkened by rapidly-collecting rainclouds before finally sloshed with heavy rain, a fitting prelude to match the opera's penultimate, or the "Apollo", scene. Another random coincidence was that Rigoletto was first premiered at La Fenice, whose opera company was in Beijing just a week ago.

The stage was designed and produced by the late Pier Luigi Samaritani, who mixed traditional forms and structures with practical solutions of modern minimalism. His Sparafucile house was an elevated stage with a meticulous, castle-like exterior which ruptured laterally at an angle to reveal the interior. This opening worked perfectly, especially during the quartet, Un dì, se ben rammentomi, when the two pairs of characters were supposed to juxtapose vocally without physically being together. The Mantua palace was minimalistic but worked effectively, with plenty of open spaces for the noblemen and the Duke's ladies to jostle around. I'm generally not a fan of modern screens, but the use of a drop-down screen to separate Sparafucile and Rigoletto in the deal scene was effective because it helped to describe the seemingly conflicting notions of the two characters' actual proximity and the darkness that infinitely separated them.

Singing the role of the Duke was Francesco Demuro, whose voice was simply too lightweight for a hall as big as the NCPA's opera house. He was visibly and audibly nervous during La donna è mobile, where his high registers seemed completely forced, dry, and uncontrolled. His lower registers were tidy enough, but for an aria so frequently heard everywhere, tidy enough was not good enough. Demuro wobbled his final B5...with the subsequent applause short and, at least as it sounded to me, almost too unnecessarily gratuitous. As a side note, Demuro was audibly looser and more relaxed in his off-stage aria during Rigoletto's Della vendetta alfin giunge l'istante! recitative -- perhaps that was when the burdensome baggage of the famous aria was finally off his shoulders.

Gilda was sung by Désirée Rancatore, whose voice was bright and impassioned. In Sì! Vendetta, tremenda vendetta!, she hit her un-scored Eb6 with apparently little effort. She actually did it twice -- but I'll explain later. So it was slightly disappointing that she chose not to hit the dominating but somewhat frivolous "diva Db6" in the quartet. The only blemish in her voice was the world's difference between her high-range singing voice and her lower-range speaking voice. When she sang a passage that hit both ranges, she sounded like two voices combined in one -- sort of like listening to Hasselbeck and Goldberg bitch-slapping each other on The View (ok, maybe this was an unfair analogy, but I ran out of ideas as I wrapped up writing this entry at 3am). Felipe Bou delivered a solid Sparafucile, with a devilish playfulness during the deal scene and a forceful assertion during the Apollo scene. The rest of the cast was solid, including Francesca Franci, who blossomed with an abundance of molasses-like sassyness in the contralto role of Maddalena, and Roberto Tagliavini, who delivered a warm-voiced Count Monterone.

But the night, without a doubt, belonged to Leo Nucci. At 67, I had little expectation, especially given that my experience with José Carreras last year, then at 61, was less than completely satisfying. But Nucci was dominant from the get-go, with a powerful voice that permeated all corners of the opera house, and with spot-on acting that brought out the complicated emotions of the title role. His Rigoletto was complex, with alternating tinges of deviousness and compassion. His voice sounded best when the lighting was mostly off, or when he hid in an unlid portion of the stage -- that was where there was no visual distraction, thereby pushing his notes after notes of deliciousness to the showcasing center. With a convexly humped spine and a weather-washed visage, Nucci was the perfect Rigoletto: Nucci was Rigoletto as much as Rigoletto was Nucci. In Cortigiani, vil razza dannata, his impassioned display of paternal love and human fragility brought the entire audience to their feet. With a prolonged ovation, Nucci had to step out of his role to thank the audience and the orchestra, and deservedly, he seemed to relish that moment. Barely two bars later, he slipped back into his character, which he must have played a million times, as he made eye contact with Gilda and responded with:

"Dio! mia Gilda!"
"Gilda, my daughter!" (my translation)

That line radiated a quality of loving sentimentalism that befitted a Thursday evening just before Father's Day weekend.

I don't say this often, but this was definitely one of my favorite opera experiences. Nucci was hands-down my favorite Rigoletto, surpassing even Wixell in the monumental '83 production with Chailly/VPO, or MacNeil in the passionate '77 live recording with Levine/Met. When Sì! Vendetta concluded Act II, the audience's reception was so rapturous that Nucci, beaming with satisfaction, called upon conductor Donato Renzetti to encore the duet (that was also where Rancatore hit her second Eb6). When his voice began to speak Verdi's language, his enduring charisma had the entire audience on a tight leash. Ultimately, it was obvious why Nucci owned both the audience and the night.