Rigoletto, Staatsoper Berlin 2019
As Giorgi Mtchedlishvili’s wild-eyed Count Monterone cursed Rigoletto and the Duke, however, the faces of the men in the ballroom assumed an alarming severity. They appeared neither amused nor unduly upset by Monterone’s outburst: they were simply stone-faced, impassive, waiting for Monterone to finish. When he did, their voices rose in a terrifyingly impersonal sentence of death. It was a scene that mirrored the dynamics of Germany’s years of authoritarian rule, when political purges took the lives of many men much like Monterone: one moment an insider, the next a traitor, and from there to prison or the grave.
The remainder of the cast completed a satisfyingly strong ensemble. […] Giorgi Mtchedlishvili’s Monterone was just as riveting in the second act as the first. Mad with anguish, he made a powerful counterpoint to Maltman. […] Mtchedlishvili expressed the festering, all-consuming pain of a character whose heart, we feel, is being gnawed apart from the inside as he dwells obsessively on the shame the Duke brought to his daughter.
– Elyse Lyon, operawire.com
