FULL Muti “legge” Rigoletto Milan 1994
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Muti "legge" Rigoletto
- Composer: Verdi Giuseppe
- Libretto: Francesco Maria Piave
- Venue & Opera Company: Aula Magna dell’Università Bocconi, Milano, Italy
- Recorded: May 9, 1994
- Type: Other
- Singers: N/A
- Conductor: Ricardo Muti
- Orchestra:
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Archivio Lorenzo Arruga, Tele+3
- Date Published: 1994
- Format: Broadcast
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
- Subtitles: yessubs, itsubs, gensubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Maestro Riccardo Muti knows how to present operas like no one else. Everyone has known this since the TV broadcasted the editions of his annual Italian Opera Academy. In 1994 (May 9) when he presented “Rigoletto” in the Aula Magna of Bocconi University in Milan, packed with students and the Scala audience, this natural aptitude was at one of his first public appearances. I am publishing the “reading” of “Rigoletto” in the Arruga Archive because I have the complete recording, made by Tele+3 (where Arruga was then responsible for Music) to which the Maestro had allowed a complete filming and broadcast, refusing the other television networks. Because it has the freshness of an encounter with young people in which he finds himself a bit of a student and freely jokes with them. Because at the same time it is a “short treatise” on how to listen, actively, entering into the continuity of the musical and theatrical discourse, of the compositional current, in line with the author’s intentions. The Maestro takes the spectator to the heart of the written sign, enters into the situation and logic of the character, not through philological obstinacy but through technical, logical, emotional identification because the sign and the character coincide. There is very careful documentation of Verdi’s intentions, and naturalness of the human feeling that Verdi has clear, profound, universal and expresses with extremely refined means. There is precision of language and freedom to lighten with even caricatural instinct (by the way I confess to having made a very small cut, remembering that the Maestro had asked to eliminate a flash of imitative mimicry so as not to offer hold to the seriousness of the press). There is love for Verdi and for this masterpiece opera compared to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, and emotional sensitivity in transmitting it. I am also publishing it because it is linked to the historical season of Muti’s first period at La Scala and he himself traces the synthesis, useful to an always forgetful audience: the choices and openings of the repertoire; moments and reasons for his battle against traditions; the responsibility, the moral duty of the Teatro alla Scala to save and show the world the interpretative principle faithful to the author’s will.
Documentary made by Gian Carlo Cabella for Tele+3.
The Arruga Archive remains available for those who may have rights to reproduce the films, which however takes place without profit and only for information purposes.