While it would seem that she is flotsam in a bizarre tale of curses and vengeance, her passive power drives the plot, for all that it is hidden. In between, she was imprisoned by a doting dad, kidnapped, raped, re-imprisoned and… well, I wouldn’t want to spoil the story. She managed much of that, and then iced the cake in a riveting final death aria… again, on her back! With spare flute harmonies, the voice must display purity and inner depth in achingly slow steps and at a punishingly high tessitura.

Active but disproportionate stage directions had her move from chair to chair and finally flop on the floor while singing “caro nome,” a gorgeous soprano aria that is difficult because it is so naked. Shagimuratova was dead on pitch in her highest notes, and her pianissimos were succulent. Vratogna’s inward-hued baritone suggested the jester’s tortured posture, not only bent by birth, but the twisted posture of those paid to mock others. Rigoletto and his daughter, Gilda, were sung convincingly by Margo Vratogna and Albina Shagimuratova. With two separate-but-equal casts sharing the bill, I was more than pleased by the second-night opening on Saturday, Sept 8, with tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz as the bad-boy Duke-a duke whose delivery was so clear and liquid that it was easy to indulge his excesses. Wonderfully atmospheric, the San Francisco Opera opened their new season with a veritable potboiler, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Leaning into the distance, colonnades mirrored the sharp disaffection and stark shadows of Di Chirico’s “Girl with a Hoop.” Masked revelers, frozen in the arches, were backlit in red.

As the curtains rose, a spotlight shone down on a lump of limbs and bells, slowly defined by motion-the hunchbacked jester, Rigoletto. A lone trumpet set a fragile entrance in the darkened house, followed by melancholy horns.

Rigoletto sf opera