Rigoletto at the Semperoper in Dresden on Sunday evening was a revival of a production first seen in 2006. It has had quite a few outings since then of which the best was surely when Dian Damrau sang Gilda and Juan Diego Flórez the Duke.
Juan Diego was paired with Natalie Dessay in the Met’s 2009 production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. I saw it in a London cinema and remember a scene of mayhem at the end of Act I in which the prompter is dragged out of her box and joins in. In Dresden the prompter’s box seemed more intrusive than usual. As the overture starts Rigoletto climbs out of it onto the stage dressed in modern day clothes. He dons his lime green jesters’ costume on stage and puts make-up on his face, preparing to join the Duke and his court at their revels.
If you put aside thoughts of Kermit it is an effective curtain-raiser. The Duke’s residence is a louche black marble atrium with some big stairs and an oculus in the ceiling and the revellers dressed in birds head masks seem suitably debauched. In the last Act there was one departure from the norm. Gilda usually gets to sing her last aria lying on the ground with her head poking out of a sack. This time she jumped nimbly out of her sack and, wearing a white off the shoulder evening dress, sang beautifully standing at the front of the stage before dying in her father’s arms. It was musically exquisite even if it did blow a big hole in the story.
We returned to London on Monday via Berlin where we lunched at Rocco Forte’s Hotel de Rome in the Unter den Linden. La Banca restaurant has tables outdoors in the courtyard. Afterwards we had coffee and a glass of wine on the 4th floor roof terrace.
