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Nov. 20 - Nov. 27, 2011 |
Chicago’s loss, our gain
Opera director Christopher Alden discusses his innovative staging of Rigoletto
By Lydia Perovic
Originally Published: 2011-10-09
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Ekaterina Sadovnikova as Gilda and Quinn Kelsey as Rigoletto in the Canadian Opera Company production of Rigoletto, 2011. Photo: Michael Cooper
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One of the busiest opera directors on the international opera circuit today, Christopher Alden was in Toronto this September for the rehearsals of the new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Canadian Opera Company. His creative team chose to set the work in the period in which Verdi composed the opera.
The Chicago Lyric Opera decided not to revive this production due to donor pressure, but Toronto audiences seem to be more open to innovative readings of the old operatic mainstays. The new Rigoletto premiered at the COC on Sept. 29 and will be on stage until Oct. 22.
How did you decide on this approach? Is this your first Rigoletto?
First time Michael Levine and I worked on this was about twelve years ago in Chicago. We were looking for a way to portray a strong power structure that the audience would immediately recognize, and we felt that setting the opera in its original period, in Renaissance, wouldn’t work for this purpose. The costumes of the renaissance era look all alike to us today and we tend to romanticize them, so it becomes hard to identify the power differentials among the characters. We wanted to have a somewhat drier, more modern period, but not completely modern, so we decided to settle on the period the piece was written in. The people who wrote the piece were talking about their time as much as anything else. Michael Levine and I tried to find an era that would make this obvious to the audience, and not have people observe a lot of singers in fancy clothes.
When was a more contemporary set up ruled out?
That had to do with the company we did this for first, the Chicago Lyric. I was told, We want you to do the kind of thing that you do, but also something that we can revive here. But this is also important to me – whenever I work on a new production of an opera from the past, I always try to see if there’s a way to do it other than in modern clothes. That’s been such a successful fall-back way to strip away some of the fantasy elements and to get down to what’s timeless about a particular piece, or what’s modern about it. But I always feel that if I can do it without doing it in modern clothes, I’m happy to not do modern clothes.
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