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I like the Canadian Opera Company’s Rigoletto, directed by Christopher Alden, starring Roland Wood, Anna Christy and Stephen Costello. Everyone I’ve talked to enthuses about the singing.

Anna Christy as Gilda, Roland Wood as Rigoletto (photo: Michael Cooper)

Ah but I like the production, and I say this, aware (via social media) that the reviews I’ve seen uniformly trash Alden. While I get this (where some do their usual refusal to accept anything new, while others are put out that this is quirky and hard to decipher in places), it seems really unfair, when we remember that the opera they want done faithful to the original score is a wooden melodrama full of scenes that make no sense. I’ve been playing this music at the piano since I was a teenager. I watched Louis Quilico sing the role many times, rolling my eyes at his acting even while I adored his singing. The last scene never worked for me, ultimately a question of which high notes would be sung rather than a genuine believable scene. As the years went by he became more and more melodramatic, which I now see makes a lot of sense, considering that the original is truly melodrama. I used to rationalize all this by seeing Rigoletto’s character –and to a lesser extent Monterone & Sparafucile– as evolutionary hybrids, new creatures who didn’t quite fit in with the older bel canto model as exemplified by Gilda & the Duke. And so while some scenes were wooden or hokey I’d lose myself in the wonderful music written for Rigoletto, while glossing over the clunky dramaturgy, the places where Verdi would grind his gears in seeking to make the thing work.

I feel that Alden’s Rigoletto is in some ways ideal, in its striving to get back in touch with the essence of the story, refusing to gloss over what’s really happening.

No one has any real agency. Gilda makes the closest thing to a choice, in offering herself up in place of the skanky Duke she loves, a choice almost totally devoid of nobility because of the foul stench emanating from the person she saves. Her father, a jester who mocked the father of one of the seducer’s victims partly to curry favour with his boss, partly because mockery and abuse were his stock in trade, begins to be fearful contemplating the curse laid up him.  And as the disaster looms closer and closer (a father who mocked another father?), we hear him speak of the curse, but in fear. Not guilt mind you, nor remorse.

Fear.

Let me repeat, true to the form of melodrama, this is a world without any real agency, and as such maybe something we have trouble understanding. I love the way Alden’s production refuses to euphemize, takes away all the hiding places. Some of those are surprising, as for instance, when Rigoletto mocks Monterone –that aforementioned father of the girl who was seduced—not by jumping about like a jester (as the mickey—mousing in the score might seem to indicate), but instead by sitting still and abusing Monterone directly, pointedly.

It’s drier and nastier as a result.

Monterone eventually gets it, but in most other productions, that’s something offstage, something we only imagine. Alden gives it to us, complete with a body swaying on the end of a rope. And instead of the quiet Giovanna in the background Alden gets Megan Latham to portray her as an enabler and the Duke’s creepy collaborator, pulling the curtain open and closed even though neither she nor anyone else is really in control.

This production, I repeat, works for me and is one I find more successful than the traditional Rigolettos of my youth. The final scene between Gilda & her father moved me for once. But I was especially shocked by the scene where Gilda goes to the killer Sparafucile, in effect offering herself in place of her lover. Intriguingly, she’s dragged by someone who might be Monterone’s daughter or simply the spirit of all the desperate women who loved the Duke. Perhaps she’s choosing, perhaps she is possessed & haunted. It’s mysterious and poetic and original at the moment of greatest melodrama, when the action is all wild passion. I was shocked to find myself tearing up, and swept away as the music moved me more than it has ever done.

Roland Wood & Anna Christy (photo: Michael Cooper)

Some of that I credit to conductor Stephen Lord’s bravura emotion, erupting from the orchestra at the key moments. But he held the show together magnificently, the COC orchestra sounding strong, agile, and above all, beautiful.

I loved this production when I saw it in 2011 (and I said that I liked it too). But I think I get it more clearly now that I have been reading about melodrama.  What I see Alden doing is unwrapping the euphemisms and stripping off the genteel façade that has made this very ugly story palatable for over a century and a half. In so doing he’s marching in step with other opera directors whose updates sharpen the dramatic edge of their shows, for instance Robert Carsen’s Iphigenie en Tauride that we saw here in Toronto at the same time that this Rigoletto first appeared here, or Atom Egoyan’s Salome, which takes an ugly story and makes it even uglier in deconstruction.

Oh my so many references to ugliness: but let me explain. Rigoletto is particularly problematic because the nicest music goes to the nastiest character, the serial seducer who leads a charmed life, while the most sympathetic creature is physically grotesque and morally ambiguous. If this were a Hollywood movie that Duke would eventually get his: but not in this film noir of an opera. Alden makes it that much more exasperating. While Verdi writes happy jocular music for the courtiers when they’re abducting Rigoletto’s daughter, and more happy jocular music when they tell their boss about their clever boys club scheme, Alden doesn’t buy in. When the courtiers show up for the abduction, although the music is all fun fun fun, Alden makes them very creepy, very scary. I love that moment. And while Verdi wrote something especially bizarre to open Act III (because of the two part aria convention, the Duke has an abrupt change of heart and manner), Alden with the help of newspapers, conjures something hysterically funny, in the chorus’s response.  It’s a melodrama, like a clockwork machine that inexorably runs without remorse to its conclusion. At times it resembles the dark comedy one glimpses in Hitchcock.

Anna Christy and Stephen Costello (photo: Michael Cooper)

On this occasion, we had an announcement that Stephen Costello was unwell yet he finished the performance. There was one high note that had a tiny bit of a crack, confirming his condition (although the omission of a few high notes also served as de facto evidence); even so he was heroic, singing boldly and with a wonderfully Italianate flair. Christy was highly sympathetic in what can be a thankless role, while Wood was especially strong dramatically and vocally.

But there is no tragedy, just sadness here in this strange space, that I called “a man’s world” back in 2011, resembling a kind of men’s club.  All are forgiven, none can be blamed in a microcosm that’s so relentless. I can see that some found it unsympathetic as though we’re watching rats in a Skinner Box. No it’s not nice, but then again: neither is Verdi’s opera.

Finally, I offer something to help get inside the world of Alden’s Rigoletto, courtesy of Jessica Chastain & Saturday Night Live. We seem to be in a world with some resemblance to Rigoletto’s world, a world where the rules are different for people like the Duke of Mantua, or the POTUS. When you watch the news and the most outrageous behaviours seem to have no consequence, no logical outcome, and you’re asking yourself “what even matters”? Perhaps one should accept that you have no agency, that there’s nothing you can do.

The concept is exactly as it sounds.  If you’re a singer wanting to do a role, Opera by Request is the place for you.  William Shookhoff is a busy man, the pianist & music director responsible for making those requests happen.

I can’t pretend that I understand the conversations that go into the choice of repertoire, but I would assume that the chief conversations surround the big roles in an opera, the difficult parts.

• Naomi Eberhard sang Salome
• Ryan Harper sang Herod
• Michael Robert-Broder sang Jochanaan
• Leah Giselle Field sang Herodias

I didn’t ask, but I wonder.  Did Shookhoff begin with a request from one or two people, and then approached likely candidates for the other parts?  I do know that Ryan Harper came to his role relatively late in place of someone else.

None of the music was cut, although the ObR concept is virtual, along the lines of opera in concert rather than fully staged.

• No dance
• No costumes
• But there was a severed head!

And while there is no orchestra, just the grand piano at College St United Church, Shookhoff did admirably in emulating the Straussian sound.

William Shookhoff, Opera by Request music director and pianist

The funny thing is, I seem to have come full circle.  Back when I wrote for the University of Toronto student newspaper The Varsity in the 1970s I interviewed Bill Shookhoff, then a coach with the Canadian Opera Company in the Mansouri era.  I remember that he spoke about the challenges of playing Salome.  I had always hoped to hear him play it and now I got my wish.

To get through two hours of playing this score one has to make a few judicious choices.  It’s not as loud as Strauss with his full orchestra: and how could it be? But that’s a good thing for the singers.

The singers we hear with Opera By Request are sometimes ex-members of the COC ensemble, sometimes singers who have not been admitted.  Some of these performances are good enough to merit at least consideration by the powers that be with the big companies.

Michael Robert-Broder’s Jochanaan was a stunningly lyrical reading of this role, one that can sometimes be misread as a prudish fundamentalist, which is to distort the drama and the music. If it’s done right we should be seduced by this, the original evangelist.  And I think that’s what we got from Michael, singing a smoothly lyrical line throughout, putting out a fabulous wall of sound from time to time, always on pitch and never harsh sounding. But most important he seemed to believe everything he was saying, to sing with a fervent love for his subject rather than like a fake preacher who has secrets in his closet.

Ryan Harper? Different kind of challenge.  I’ve known this voice awhile, watching him develop as an artist, from a light tenor who sang in the Richmond Hill production of Cosi fan tutte, where he showed a gift for comedy, then as the second of the Rodolfos in Against the Grain’s La boheme, where his comic gift again took me by surprise.  A Rodolfo who isn’t just a self-centred poet, but can actually bring something to the horseplay in Acts I & IV? Excellent! And surprising.  His Don José for Loose Tea Music Theatre’s Tragédie de Carmen showed not just a growing heft in the voice, but acting chops as well.  And so I wasn’t surprised at all to see him taking on Herod in Salome, at the last minute I found out in an after-the-show conversation.  It’s a role that sometimes is done in a manner that escapes singing full out, thinking of the approach of Gerhard Stolze (on the Solti recording with Nilsson) where it’s a light sound that often verges on falsetto.  We heard Richard Margison sing the pants off this role not so long ago with the COC.  Harper gave us something between Margison’s full-out singing and Stolze’s faux production, as he sometimes put his voice into something very delicate and light –suitable for the ironic delivery we sometimes must have from Herod, and sometimes a very Wagnerian sound such as what we got from Margison, as in his hallucination sequence, or when the story turns dark in the last half hour.

Cian Horrobin had everything you want in a Narraboth. He’s young and exuberant sounding, he sang powerfully, and is attractive onstage. And Leah Giselle Field gave us the kind of sardonic delivery you want from your Herodias, the core of this dysfunctional family feud.

Opera by Request return Feb 10^th at 7:30 pm with Bellini’s Norma. Further information.