Capitalising on their success with Verdi’s opera Rigoletto during the Aix-en-Provence Festival in the summer, the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gianandrea Noseda chose to open the 2013/14 season last night with the same work. It was a bold move – with no set, no make-up and no costumes as distractions, the focus would be on the music, the quality of singing and a very limited amount of acting. Imperfections that might have escaped notice in a full dramatic production could have been magnified to make or break the evening. As it turned out, the practice the orchestra had had in the summer stood them in good stead, and it was a thrilling introduction to the season.
Rigoletto is a character opera audiences love to hate. Based on Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, it is a tragedy not in the sense that the fate of the characters is inevitable, but that the reckless designs of seductive deceit among the aristocracy wreak havoc with the lives of their helpless victims. Some of the social commentary came so close to home, or perhaps so offended the prudish sensibilities of 19th-century audiences, that Verdi had unpleasant brushes with the Austrian censors in Venice.
Hunchbacks have been potent material for development by dramatists such as Shakespeare and Hugo – somehow physical deformity denotes a faulty character. Conflicted by loyalty to his daughter and to his court master, and betrayal by his compatriots, Rigoletto evokes sympathy for his tormented upbringing and being a target of taunts for his physical deformity. A scheming and deceitful blackguard he certainly can be; he does what he does, not for personal ambition, but rather out of misguided loyalty to a morally frail master given to licentious excesses.
Greek baritone Dimitri Platanias, with his dour features, was an unfathomable and heavyweight Rigoletto with plenty of pent-up anger and agony. Menacing as he vented spleen on the privileged class in “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” (“Accursed race of courtiers”), he came up a little short on tenderness in the duet with daughter Gilda in “Figlia! Mio padre!” (“Daughter! My father!”). Masterful phrasing and an underlying layer of tautness made for effective delivery of this complex role.
Tenor Saimir Pirgu as the Duke of Mantua was quite affable, but perhaps did not reek enough of casual wantonness in exploiting vulnerable women to be hateful. Every inch as suave and sweet-talking as you would expect from the Duke, he has a satiny tone that helped him sail through “Questa o quella” (“This woman or that”) almost unnoticed, but when it came to “La donna è mobile” (“Woman is fickle”), perhaps the best-known aria from the opera, the fray at the edges in the highest register belied a tinge of thinness in the voice.