A lot happens before anyone sings a note in Opera Holland Park’s season-opening production of Rigoletto. Bicycles, bells and birdsong set the scene, then a man working quietly at a desk is grabbed by a smartly dressed gang and half drowned. Are we watching a murder? His assailants let him go, laugh as he shakes with fear, and throw him a towel. It’s an initiation rite. The fear that runs through Verdi’s opera is immediately evoked; the life-or-death high stakes, not so much.
This new production is directed by Cecilia Stinton and conducted by Lee Reynolds, who together brought Holland Park audiences a refreshingly unhackneyed, quietly feminist Carmen last year. The corrupt and licentious ducal court in Renaissance Mantua has been transferred to Oxford in the Charleston era, with the party music that Verdi wrote for a small onstage group of players turned into a scratchy old gramophone recording of a 1920s-style dance band, a detail that Reynolds makes work surprisingly convincingly.
The Duke is a student, holding court with his Bullingdon Club chums plus an almost exhaustive cross-section of interwar university society: artist, socialite, nerd, bluestocking, clergyman, a few crusty old dons. But what hold does he really have over them? He and his buddies – including Rigoletto, a myopic, bemedalled army veteran wearing a leg brace – can humiliate them at will, yes, but if the Duke’s not someone who orders people’s deaths on a whim then there’s far less at stake at every stage of this story, and Rigoletto’s hiring of a cheap hitman to kill him feels sordid as well as desperate. Even the most obnoxious members of the Bullingdon Club dealt in a couple of threatened black eyes rather than actual murder.
Still, it hangs together here thanks to some convincing performances, Stinton’s attention to detail and Reynolds’s pacy conducting of the City of London Sinfonia. Stephen Gadd’s expressive Rigoletto has the potential to be excellent although here he seemed to be singing around an indisposition, avoiding some of the higher notes and husbanding his resources, albeit with exemplary skill. Alessandro Scotto di Luzio sings the Duke in a big, bright, Italian tenor but his voice sounds unwieldy, his tuning uncertain – especially in comparison with Alison Langer, who provides the best singing, capturing in her soprano all the sweetness Verdi assigns to Rigoletto’s closeted daughter Gilda while giving the character a determined edge that reaches beyond the self-sacrificing element of her story. The reframing of that narrative doesn’t quite hold fast, but it still makes for a highly engaging show.
• Rigoletto is at Opera Holland Park, London, until 24 June.
