Music: Verdi with a Jukebox

The English National Opera makes its first U.S. tour

Can this be Rigoletto? The curtain rises on a mid-20th century New York City hotel ballroom instead of a 16th century Mantuan ducal palazzo; the Duke and his courtiers are not nobles but crime lords, and Rigoletto is a bartender, not a jester. The second scene takes place in a Little Italy tenement where Rigoletto has secreted his daughter, Gilda, and where she is wooed by the Duke, who sports a high school warmup jacket. The finale is set in a seedy, Hopperesque waterfront dive. When the Duke sings his famous La donna e mobile aria, in English, he first pops a coin in a jukebox that stands beneath a poster for From Here to Eternity.

It may owe almost as much to Francis Coppola's The Godfather movies as to Francesco Piave's original libretto, but it is Rigoletto nonetheless, and it is the clear hit of the current U.S. tour by the English National Opera. The company, making its American debut, opened in Houston late last month and moved to Austin last week; this week it plays San Antonio before rounding out the month with stints in New Orleans and New York City. Director Jonathan Miller's startling reinterpretation of Verdi's first masterpiece was the talk of London at its premiere in 1982, but it aroused the ire of some Italian Americans after the tour was announced; they objected to the implied Mafia motif. Yet this Rigoletto no more defames Italians than, say, Un Ballo in Maschera does Bostonians. Rather, it recasts the familiar work in a light that forces audiences to rethink it and savor it anew. Renaissance vendettas can seem remote, "operatic," unreal, but transplanted to Mulberry Street in the 1950s, they take on a grimy, visceral immediacy. In the major roles, John Rawnsley as Rigoletto displays a rich, focused baritone, and Valerie Masterson as Gilda has a clear, secure high soprano. Tenor Arthur Davies' voice is a little light for the Duke, but he manages to make the character at once attractive and morally repugnant. As the trampy siren

Maddalena, Jean Rigby has a come-hither catch in her dark mezzo. Conducted by the ENO's impressive music director Mark Elder, 37, Rigoletto is a triumph.

The production exemplifies the distinctive merits of a company that is perhaps too little known on this side of the Atlantic. From its beginnings in 1931 as the Vic-Wells Opera (later Sadler's Wells), the ENO has prized a sense of ensemble that ought to be the envy of opera houses everywhere. Only a few of its singers have made major careers outside the company, but the pleasures of the ENO are to be found less in the singing than in the apposite theatricality of its productions, the innovative visions of its directors and the restless inquisitiveness of its approach to the whole range of the repertory, including infrequently heard works by Dvorak, Smetana and Janacek. Unlike the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, which is an international company featuring a rotation of globe-trotting star performers, the ENO is a frankly nationalistic company. It performs only in English, employs mostly British singers and conductors, and regularly champions British works. As such, it is probably a better barometer of the state of opera in Britain than the Royal Opera, which makes its own U.S. debut next month at the Olym pic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.