Off with the motley: Rigoletto at La Monnaie

By Simon Rees, 28 May 2014

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Reviewed at La Monnaie | De Munt: Grand Hall, Brussels on 20 May 2014

Verdi, Rigoletto

La Monnaie | De Munt

Samuel Jean, Conductor

Robert Carsen, Director

Radu Boruzescu, Set Designer

Arturo Chacón-Cruz, The Duke of Mantua

Dimitri Platanias, Rigoletto

Anne-Catherine Gillet, Gilda

Sara Fulgoni, Maddalena

Ain Anger, Sparafucile

Benvenuto Cellini: Strassberger loses the plot at La Monnaie

No’a L. bat Miri, 28th January

Thaddeus Strassberger’s Brussels debut presents Berlioz's opera semiseria with plenty of good music but far more visual noise.

***11

Verdi caught in La Monnaie's revolving door

Eleanor Knight, 22nd March

A marathon double bill using music from Verdi's early operas largely falls flat in Brussels.

**111

Mixed messages lost in the medium: Foccroulle's Cassandra

Eleanor Knight, 10th September

Foccroulle’s limited score imitates environmental catastrophe while Jocelyn’s libretto tries – unevenly – to understand why we might ignore it.

**111

Black Swan: Barbara Hannigan returns in Warlikowski's Lulu

Kevin W Ng, 18th November

Barbara Hannigan is better than ever in Krzysztof Warlikowski's iconic Lulu at La Monnaie – an historic event.

*****

Portals into the surreal in La Monnaie's The Turn of the Screw

Katherine Syer, 30th April

A highly satisfying level of polish in La Monnaie's stream in which one recognizes a precisely executed live performance at its core – one that would be thrilling to experience in person.

****1

Listen with Mother: Tsar Saltan as autism parable at La Monnaie

Mark Pullinger, 16th June

Dmitri Tcherniakov's staging turns Rimsky-Korsakov's opera into storytelling for an autistic boy, but does he deliver a fairy tale ending?

*****

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Simon Rees

Simon Rees writes programme articles and surtitles for most British opera companies, and reviews for Opera, Opera Now, Musical Opinion, Early Music Today and a wide range of other publications. A novelist, poet and librettist, from 1989 to 2012 he was dramaturg at Welsh National Opera. He lives in Cardiff.