“Rigoletto”

CRITIC’S PICK: Giuseppe Verdi’s celebrated tale of love, betrayal and revenge, which first saw the light of day in 1851, gets a sparkling new staging from the Atlanta Opera and Tomer Zvulun, its artistic director. Tbilisi-born baritone George Gagnidze plays the woeful title role, making his Atlanta debut. “He possesses a beautiful capacity for timbral differentiation, is an excellent actor, and his Italian pronunciation is perfect,” says Giorgio Koukl of EarRelevant. “Mr. Gagnidze is a dream singer for any opera house.” Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter, will be portrayed by rising soprano and Macon native Jasmine Habersham, and bass Patrick Guetti takes on the role of the assassin Sparafucile. Tenor Won Whi Choi is the lascivious Duke of Mantua; he sings the famous aria “La Donna e Mobile” (women are fickle) in Act 3. “Verdi’s iconic clown character, Rigoletto, is doomed from the very first scene to a cursed fate,” says Zvulun. “Our production highlights his decline, particularly the psychological one. We leaned into the aesthetic of German painters Otto Dix and George Grosz and their cinematic successors Fellini and Buñuel to present the abstraction, grittiness, and surrealism that are essential to our story.” — Kevin C. Madigan

CRITIC’S PICK: For its final 2023 mainstage production, The Atlanta Opera presents Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, a gritty, lurid opera centered around the exploits of the hunchbacked jester at the court of serial sexual abuser the Duke of Mantua. With the promise that “Rigoletto delves into the masks we wear to fit into society, both seen and unseen, set in a society riven with political corruption, moral degradation and the unrepentant manipulations of an inexplicably seductive bad guy,” director Tomer Zvulun’s Rigoletto features baritone George Gagnidze, a Metropolitan Opera favorite, in the title role, together with Korean tenor Won Whi Choi and soprano Jasmine Habersham. A co-production between The Atlanta Opera, the Houston Grand Opera and the Dallas Opera, the production is designed by Erhard Rom and Jessica Jahn with lighting design by Tom Hase. — Doug DeLoach