Verdi: Rigoletto – Leo Nucci

Leo Nucci has been singing Rigoletto since roughly the Carter administration, and there are moments on this disc where you can hear every one of those years — not as decay, exactly, but as something closer to sediment. The voice has lost the bloom it had in his prime RCA years opposite Pavarotti, and the top occasionally sounds hammered into submission rather than freed. But the wear actually serves the character. This is a jester who has spent a lifetime absorbing abuse and dishing it back out, and Nucci’s grizzled, grainy baritone tells you that history before he’s sung a note of recitative.

The curse — la maledizione — is the hinge on which this whole opera swings. Verdi wanted the orchestra’s opening bars, that ominous unison tattoo in the brass, to function almost like a motto, a Dante-esque inscription over the gates of the drama. Nucci understands this bone-deep. His final “Ah, la maledizione!” doesn’t shout. It collapses inward, which is the correct and much harder choice. Too many Rigolettos treat the line as a chance for one last blast of chest voice. Nucci lets the sound crack, lets the pitch go slightly unstable, because a father cradling his dead daughter has no business sounding vocally tidy.

Francesco Demuro’s Duke is a trickier matter. He has the Italianate squillo for “Questa o quella,” tossed off with the right kind of aristocratic contempt, flippant and unbothered — this is a man who has never once imagined consequences. But “La donna è mobile” comes across a touch foursquare here. The rhythmic snap wants more insouciance, more of the strutting danger that made Pavarotti’s and, before him, Björling’s readings so indelible. Demuro sings it correctly. He doesn’t yet sing it dangerously.

Nino Machaidze, as Gilda, is the real discovery of this set, or should be. Her “Caro nome” floats rather than announces itself, with a trill that’s genuinely integrated into the line rather than bolted on for applause. Listen to how she shapes the final cadenza, pulling the tempo back almost imperceptibly, like a held breath. There’s an innocence in the timbre that never curdles into blandness, and by the Act III quartet she’s found real steel underneath the sweetness — exactly backward from how most young Gildas approach the role, and exactly right dramatically.

Some history bears on how we hear this piece now. Verdi fought the Austrian censors in Venice tooth and claw to keep Victor Hugo’s hunchbacked jester and his doomed daughter intact, relocating the action from the French court to an invented Mantuan duchy largely to get Monterone’s curse past the bureaucrats without losing its moral charge. He called the subject, in a letter to Piave, “worthy of Shakespeare.” What’s often lost in modern productions, glossy and relocated to who-knows-what decade, is the specific cruelty of Rigoletto‘s profession: he is paid to mock the very courtiers who will destroy him, and Gilda’s tragedy is that she has been sealed away from all of it, kept in a kind of domestic ignorance that makes her an easy mark. This disc doesn’t try to reinvent that frame. It trusts the piece.

The conducting is competent and idiomatic, occasionally four-square in the big ensemble passages, and it doesn’t aim for revelation. Fine. Not every Rigoletto needs to out-Solti Solti or out-Muti Muti. What this set offers is a Rigoletto sung by people who understand Italian theatrical convention from the inside, phrase by phrase, gesture by gesture, with a title character whose voice has earned its cracks.

Does it displace Callas-Gobbi-di Stefano on EMI, or the old Warren-Peters-Berger Met broadcasts, or Pavarotti’s prime studio account? No. But as a document of Nucci’s long, intelligent inhabitation of this role, and as an introduction to Machaidze’s considerable gifts, it earns its place on the shelf. Recommended, with the reservations noted.