Word: rigoletto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Both Dexter and Levine have performed erratically. Dexter's record with modern opera is extraordinary--his Dialogues of the Carmelites and Billy Budd exemplify how best to present modern operas with narrow appeal. But his productions of standards from the nineteenth century repertory, like his curious Rigoletto, have infuriated audiences. Levine's conducting has gained undeserved acclaim in the press. It's forceful, direct, and intractably unsubtle; Levine takes scores and homogenizes them. Furthermore, at a callow 35 he is attempting to conduct everything in the repertory from Mozart to Berg and Weill...
...great many things wonderfully well. Some of them, like spinning out a legato line or singing a high C, are displayed in La Favorita. As an actor Pavarotti can be funny or tragic (both in La Bohème), or a careless aristocrat (the Duke in Rigoletto). But with his native wit and musical intelligence, Pavarotti cannot act dumb. Unfortunately, that is required of Fernando, the hero of La Favorita...
...Lulu, they justify the Met's often advertised suggestion that to buy one of its tickets is to "strike a blow for civilization." When Levine and Dexter miss, they raise worries about the wisdom of dual artistic control. Last week's new production of Verdi's Rigoletto was about as splendid musically as it could be. Yet the onstage events ate at the very heart of the work, robbing it of too much essential contrast and believability...
...this Rigoletto's failings, Dexter must bear most of the blame. Yet Levine, despite the beauty and power of his conducting, cannot be totally absolved. It is the peculiar penchant of both to want to concentrate as much action as possible at the front of the stage. In Dexter's case the practice seems to have developed during a brilliant career on the legitimate stages of Broadway and London's West End. For Levine it seems to be a case of wanting to bring the singers closer to both the audience and his own podium. They...
...unit set can be a house or room or a neo-Bayreuthring that rotates on its axis to create changes of scene. The new Rigoletto (cost: close to $300,000, neither cheap nor extravagant) is built around a leaning tower that suggests not so much Pisa but Babel and, at times, the land of Hansel and Gretel. At the start it represents the palace of the Duke of Mantua. For the second scene it becomes the house where the jester Rigoletto has hidden, or so he thinks, his daughter Gilda from a menacing outside world. And so on. The tower...