Verdi with a Jukebox

By Michael Walsh

The English National Opera makes its first U.S. tour

Can this be Rigoletto? The curtain rises on a mid-20th century New York City hotel ballroom instead of a 16th century Mantuan ducal palazzo; the Duke and his courtiers are not nobles but crime lords, and Rigoletto is a bartender, not a jester. The second scene takes place in a Little Italy tenement where Rigoletto has secreted his daughter, Gilda, and where she is wooed by the Duke, who sports a high school warmup jacket. The finale is set in a seedy, Hopperesque waterfront dive. When the Duke sings his famous La donna e mobile aria, in English, he first pops a coin in a jukebox that stands beneath a poster for From Here to Eternity.

It may owe almost as much to Francis Coppola's The Godfather movies as to Francesco Piave's original libretto, but it is Rigoletto nonetheless, and it is the clear hit of the current U.S. tour by the English National Opera. The company, making its American debut, opened in Houston late last month and moved to Austin last week; this week it plays San Antonio before rounding out the month with stints in New Orleans and New York City. Director Jonathan Miller's startling reinterpretation of Verdi's first masterpiece was the talk of London at its premiere in 1982, but it aroused the ire of some Italian Americans after the tour was announced; they objected to the implied Mafia motif. Yet this Rigoletto no more defames Italians than, say, Un Ballo in Maschera does Bostonians. Rather, it recasts the familiar work in a light that forces audiences to rethink it and savor it anew. Renaissance vendettas can seem remote, "operatic," unreal, but transplanted to Mulberry Street in the 1950s, they take on a grimy, visceral immediacy. In the major roles, John Rawnsley as Rigoletto displays a rich, focused baritone, and Valerie Masterson as Gilda has a clear, secure high soprano. Tenor Arthur Davies' voice is a little light for the Duke, but he manages to make the character at once attractive and morally repugnant. As the trampy siren

Maddalena, Jean Rigby has a come-hither catch in her dark mezzo. Conducted by the ENO's impressive music director Mark Elder, 37, Rigoletto is a triumph.

The production exemplifies the distinctive merits of a company that is perhaps too little known on this side of the Atlantic. From its beginnings in 1931 as the Vic-Wells Opera (later Sadler's Wells), the ENO has prized a sense of ensemble that ought to be the envy of opera houses everywhere. Only a few of its singers have made major careers outside the company, but the pleasures of the ENO are to be found less in the singing than in the apposite theatricality of its productions, the innovative visions of its directors and the restless inquisitiveness of its approach to the whole range of the repertory, including infrequently heard works by Dvorak, Smetana and Janacek. Unlike the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, which is an international company featuring a rotation of globe-trotting star performers, the ENO is a frankly nationalistic company. It performs only in English, employs mostly British singers and conductors, and regularly champions British works. As such, it is probably a better barometer of the state of opera in Britain than the Royal Opera, which makes its own U.S. debut next month at the Olym pic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

The other productions on the ENO's tour are more problematic than Rigoletto, but they are generally characteristic of the company's tastes, strengths and limitations. The sole exception is Gilbert and Sullivan's parody of fashionable Victorian aestheticism, Patience. The company has never been known for its Savoyard proclivities, and although the piece makes a winsome enough evening in the theater, boasting several sharply etched performances, its charms are best left to confirmed G & S aficionados. More typical are two Benjamin Britten works, Gloriana (1953), a controversial commemoration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and The Turn of the Screw (1954), based on the Henry James ghost story.

Gloriana, a courtly recounting of the Elizabeth and Essex affair, was a failure at its premiere. In a hallucinatory, melodramatic ending, the aging Queen confronts her mortality; first-nighters, who expected something more celebratory, were puzzled and even offended. The ENO has made the reputation of Gloriana a restoration project. Its production, directed in 1966 by Colin Graham, is resplendent with rich woodwork and ornamented bro cade, but its visual fecundity cannot dis guise the piece's fundamental weakness: Gloriana is less an opera than a ceremony and is probably best appreciated in its country of origin.

Even more lavish is the Graham staging of War and Peace, the sprawling, epi sodic attempt to transfer Tolstoy to the stage that occupied Prokofiev for more than a decade until his death in 1953. The director uses back projections to achieve a scenic coup during the burning of Moscow, and he adroitly handles the large forces demanded by the composer. Aside from Baritone Norman Bailey's heroic Kutuzov, though, the singing is earnest rather than inspired, and the relentless, new-Soviet-man socialist realism of the musical idiom is only occasionally leavened with the lyric strain familiar from such works as the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Yet the choral work is as forceful as a Russian winter, and the grandeur of the production and the composer's vision add up to a stimulating, if exhausting, spectacular.

"My people must have the best," ENO Founder Lilian Baylis is said to have remarked, referring to the English public in queenly tones. "God tells me the best in music is grand opera. Therefore, my people must have grand opera." There is much more to grand opera than a rented superstar astride a well-ridden war horse, and the ENO is showing just how much more there is.

--By Michael Walsh