Rigoletto

Rigoletto

Dell Hall at the Long Center, through Feb. 8

Running time: 2 hr, 40 min

The hunchback wanders among the courtiers, briefly frozen in the midst of their bacchanalian revels, and with every halting step, his bitterness salts the ground beneath him. The heavy tread, the surly look, the disgruntled way he dons his jester's cap speak volumes about what he thinks of this debauched rabble and his role as their fool.

The figures in tableau eventually break into raucous celebration, lightening the atmosphere, but it can't erase the sense of dread established earlier. Even if you didn't already know this story, you'd know that it will not end well.

Still, as is often the case with classic tales, knowing the destination doesn't make the journey any less pleasurable. When a great story is told with skill and passion, what the heart feels trumps what the head knows, and you find yourself caught up in it all over again, leaning forward with anticipation, pulse racing, as if hearing the story for the first time. So it is with Austin Lyric Opera's latest revival of Rigoletto, which has been crafted with a wealth of passion and skill that expertly balances the needs of the music and the drama; that conveys, even to a novice, why composer Giuseppe Verdi was a master of his chosen art form; that sweeps you into its tempest of indulgence, deception, romance, and revenge.

It's a straightforward retelling, eschewing the kind of conceptual design flourishes or interpretive readings so often seen with classics of the stage in recent years and seeming all the stronger for it. Allen Charles Klein's scenery and Gail Bakkom's costumes ground us solidly in the Italian Renaissance and do so with a style and a grandeur that underpin the story rather than overwhelm it, giving director Kay Walker Castaldo space to drive the narrative forward in simple, smartly staged scenes – scenes awash in moodiness, thanks to the ominous gloom provided by lighting designer David Nancarrow and by the ALO Orchestra under Richard Buckley's sublime command. The maestro controls the score with the firmness of a hand gripping a knife, using it to maintain a tension throughout that's like a blade poised to strike.

Through this charged environment limps Todd Thomas' Rigoletto, seething with resentment. The ill will roiling within the jester doesn't appear to spring from his deformity – we don't feel the weight of that hump on his back – but from his mind, from somewhere just behind the brow that looks perpetually creased and the pinched gaze below it. Thomas releases that pent-up disdain through a forceful baritone dark with scorn, seemingly for the whole of humanity. But we come to see that there is one person for whom Rigoletto feels tenderness, one ray of light in his black world: his daughter, Gilda, whom he keeps secreted at home, sheltered from the corruption of the court. Lyubov Petrova wears the sequestered ingenue's innocence well, her face sweetly open with trust, her soprano as pure and light as snowfall or the milk-white shawl she clutches to her heart. Listening to her sing "Caro nome" is like reclining into a bed of silk pillows: elegant, smooth, luxurious. Alas, the lover she sings of so gorgeously does not remain as true to her as he vows; he is the notoriously licentious Duke of Mantua, whose signature aria, "La donna é mobile," muses on the fickleness of women. (Pot. Kettle. Black.) Tenor Chad Shelton brings a kind of Texas frat-boy sensibility to the duke; he possesses a native charm that's genuinely appealing, but it's rooted in a palpable sense of privilege and unapologetic self-gratification – he's born to party and doesn't care if anyone gets hurt by it.

Of course, someone will get hurt before the curtain falls, and the third act brings it to bear with particular potency beneath an impressively intimidating thunderstorm that, thanks to Nancarrow, seems to stretch throughout Dell Hall. The story ends as you knew it must, in tragedy, but by the time the vengeful jester sees his daughter's life slip away, you will have felt that thrill of the tale told well, taken a journey that's involving, enthralling, fresh.