Landmarks Films Series
FREE
Thursdays at 7pm
SEPTEMBER 10
RIGOLETTO
Director: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Sets: Gianni Quaranta
Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
Conductor: Riccardo Chailly
Orchestra: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Choir: Wiener Staatsopernchor (E: Vienna State Opera Chorus)
Stage Director: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Costumes: Martin Schlumpf
Libretto: Francesco Maria Piave
Soloist: Ingvar Wixell (Rigoletto, Il Conte di Monterone), Luciano Pavarotti (Duca di Mantova), Edita Gruberova (Gilda), Ferruccio Furlanetto (Sparafucile)
This is the classic Jean-Pierre Ponnelle film of Verdi's colourful tragedy, with the role of the dashing Duke played in heroic manner by Luciano Pavarotti. Filmed in the early 1980s, it was shot on location and features moving performances from two great singers of our time — Ingvar Wixell as the hunchback, and Edita Gruberova as his beautiful but ill-fated daughter. The soundtrack was conducted by none other than Riccardo Chailly, directing the Vienna Philharmonic. Since its first release on CDV and VHS, this has remained one of Decca's top-selling videos, and has no serious rival in the video catalogue.
"The means of film and television allow us to narrate a piece in a way that has never been seen before," declared Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. "I am keenly interested in enhancing operas or musical, pieces with technical means and interpreting them in a way that is not possible on the stage." Ponnelle's dozen opera films were extrapolations of his successful theatrical productions, bold conceptions that never quite disguise their theatrical origins, with the camera frame basically replacing the proscenium.
This arresting 1982 Rigoletto derives from a production first seen in San Francisco in 1973. Both staging and film open with a mimed sequence superimposed upon Verdi's orchestral prelude - Rigoletto grieves over the dead Gilda - and then proceed to tell the tragic tale as a long nightmarish sequence of flashbacks.
Ponnelle presses garishness to extreme in the revels that begin the story at the Duke of Mantua's court.,The stage directions indicate simply "festa da ballo"; Ponnelle gives us a fullblown Roman orgy, replete with vomitting, even rats. On stage, in lurid reds, the director's visual inspiration looked like E. A. Poe - Prospero's Masque of the Red Death. In the film it is apparently Petronius's banquet in the Satyricon, as visualized by Fellini.
Ponnelle sets this depraved spectacle in the Baroque splendour of Parma's vast, 17th century Teatro Farnese. Indeed, one of this film's attractions is its use of breathtaking north-Italian locations. In the second scene, he draws out a parallel between the jester Rigoletto and the cut-throat Sparafucile, as he did on stage, by costuming them identically in black cloaks and feather-adorned hats. And he choreographs - as a sensuous pas de deux - the duet they sing over a sinister muted cello and double bass obbligato.
At the opening of Act II, the Duke flees the vine-draped haven that Rigoletto has created for his innocent daughter and rides off to his own digs; lamenting "Ella mi fu rapita", he enters his sumptuous foyer - no less than the spectacular Horse Room of the Palazzo del Te, the summer palace and horse farm near Mantua that Giulio Romano built for the 16th-century Gonzagas. The subsequent "action", however, is largely situated in the Duke's bedchamber.
Act III is shot inside and outside a waterside tavern - simultaneously for the quartet, as the horrified Rigoletto and Gilda gawp through the window at the Duke and Maddalena's rapacious love play. Finally, after Gilda's self-sacrifice, staged with the formality of a ritual murder, Rigoletto, waiting in a flat-bottomed boat on the Mincio under the inn, receives the sack containing Gilda from Sparafucile (the superbly dark-voiced young Ferruccio Furlanetto} through a trapdoor. The final duet finds father and dying daughter in the boat floating in the middle of a lake formed by the Mincio, shot against the magnificent skyline of medieval Mantua.
As Rigoletto, Ingvar Wixell, the versatile Swedish baritone who was one of the finest Verdi interpreters of the day, brings to the role his formidable vocel and histrionic powers. In depicting the hunchback on film, Ponnelle has used the medium to point out another parallel between Rigoletto and Monterone, two fathers of abducted daughters: both are sung and enacted in the film by Wixell.
Edita Gruberova is a touchingly vulnerable Gilda, who can also dispatch the demanding coloratura of „Caro nome" with a refresfilng lack of stress and strain. And Luciano Pavarotti in his full-throated prime is a surprisingly animated Duke. He does not, of course, look much like the "poor student" he claims to be, in a line delivered to Gilda with an understandable lack of sincerity. But he is convincing in just about every other respect and was rewarded for his performance with an Emmy from America's Academy of Television Arts.
The score is in the best of hands with the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Chailly, who cunningly paces it to extract every extraordinary dramatic effect from the composer's first mature masterpiece, even bringing a welcome delicacy to the Duke's „orgy“ music, with such elegance in the off-stage dances as to make them sound like Mozart. Verdi would sureIy have approved.
Text written by Richard Evidon
FREE
Thursdays at 7pm
SEPTEMBER 10
RIGOLETTO
Director: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Sets: Gianni Quaranta
Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
Conductor: Riccardo Chailly
Orchestra: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Choir: Wiener Staatsopernchor (E: Vienna State Opera Chorus)
Stage Director: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Costumes: Martin Schlumpf
Libretto: Francesco Maria Piave
Soloist: Ingvar Wixell (Rigoletto, Il Conte di Monterone), Luciano Pavarotti (Duca di Mantova), Edita Gruberova (Gilda), Ferruccio Furlanetto (Sparafucile)
This is the classic Jean-Pierre Ponnelle film of Verdi's colourful tragedy, with the role of the dashing Duke played in heroic manner by Luciano Pavarotti. Filmed in the early 1980s, it was shot on location and features moving performances from two great singers of our time — Ingvar Wixell as the hunchback, and Edita Gruberova as his beautiful but ill-fated daughter. The soundtrack was conducted by none other than Riccardo Chailly, directing the Vienna Philharmonic. Since its first release on CDV and VHS, this has remained one of Decca's top-selling videos, and has no serious rival in the video catalogue.
"The means of film and television allow us to narrate a piece in a way that has never been seen before," declared Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. "I am keenly interested in enhancing operas or musical, pieces with technical means and interpreting them in a way that is not possible on the stage." Ponnelle's dozen opera films were extrapolations of his successful theatrical productions, bold conceptions that never quite disguise their theatrical origins, with the camera frame basically replacing the proscenium.
This arresting 1982 Rigoletto derives from a production first seen in San Francisco in 1973. Both staging and film open with a mimed sequence superimposed upon Verdi's orchestral prelude - Rigoletto grieves over the dead Gilda - and then proceed to tell the tragic tale as a long nightmarish sequence of flashbacks.
Ponnelle presses garishness to extreme in the revels that begin the story at the Duke of Mantua's court.,The stage directions indicate simply "festa da ballo"; Ponnelle gives us a fullblown Roman orgy, replete with vomitting, even rats. On stage, in lurid reds, the director's visual inspiration looked like E. A. Poe - Prospero's Masque of the Red Death. In the film it is apparently Petronius's banquet in the Satyricon, as visualized by Fellini.
Ponnelle sets this depraved spectacle in the Baroque splendour of Parma's vast, 17th century Teatro Farnese. Indeed, one of this film's attractions is its use of breathtaking north-Italian locations. In the second scene, he draws out a parallel between the jester Rigoletto and the cut-throat Sparafucile, as he did on stage, by costuming them identically in black cloaks and feather-adorned hats. And he choreographs - as a sensuous pas de deux - the duet they sing over a sinister muted cello and double bass obbligato.
At the opening of Act II, the Duke flees the vine-draped haven that Rigoletto has created for his innocent daughter and rides off to his own digs; lamenting "Ella mi fu rapita", he enters his sumptuous foyer - no less than the spectacular Horse Room of the Palazzo del Te, the summer palace and horse farm near Mantua that Giulio Romano built for the 16th-century Gonzagas. The subsequent "action", however, is largely situated in the Duke's bedchamber.
Act III is shot inside and outside a waterside tavern - simultaneously for the quartet, as the horrified Rigoletto and Gilda gawp through the window at the Duke and Maddalena's rapacious love play. Finally, after Gilda's self-sacrifice, staged with the formality of a ritual murder, Rigoletto, waiting in a flat-bottomed boat on the Mincio under the inn, receives the sack containing Gilda from Sparafucile (the superbly dark-voiced young Ferruccio Furlanetto} through a trapdoor. The final duet finds father and dying daughter in the boat floating in the middle of a lake formed by the Mincio, shot against the magnificent skyline of medieval Mantua.
As Rigoletto, Ingvar Wixell, the versatile Swedish baritone who was one of the finest Verdi interpreters of the day, brings to the role his formidable vocel and histrionic powers. In depicting the hunchback on film, Ponnelle has used the medium to point out another parallel between Rigoletto and Monterone, two fathers of abducted daughters: both are sung and enacted in the film by Wixell.
Edita Gruberova is a touchingly vulnerable Gilda, who can also dispatch the demanding coloratura of „Caro nome" with a refresfilng lack of stress and strain. And Luciano Pavarotti in his full-throated prime is a surprisingly animated Duke. He does not, of course, look much like the "poor student" he claims to be, in a line delivered to Gilda with an understandable lack of sincerity. But he is convincing in just about every other respect and was rewarded for his performance with an Emmy from America's Academy of Television Arts.
The score is in the best of hands with the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Chailly, who cunningly paces it to extract every extraordinary dramatic effect from the composer's first mature masterpiece, even bringing a welcome delicacy to the Duke's „orgy“ music, with such elegance in the off-stage dances as to make them sound like Mozart. Verdi would sureIy have approved.
Text written by Richard Evidon
