With the figurative gun to his head, Giuseppe Verdi reluctantly named “my hunchback” his favorite among his operas. Out of misplaced tact, the court jester Rigoletto’s physical deformity—which is at the heart of his sense of self, fundamental to the narrative, and possibly even written into the syncopations of his music—often goes unshown and unmentioned nowadays. We don’t know what the very smart director Tomer Zvulun has up his sleeve for this production, but we can vouch for James Conlon as a first-rate maestro for Verdi. And the casting is stellar. The Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey, who understudied the title role at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2006 and claimed it as if by birthright in Oslo in 2011, comes to Los Angeles in the wake of further triumphs in a dozen music capitals including London, Paris, Madrid, New York, and his native Honolulu. As Gilda, the convent-bred innocent, the Italian soprano Rosa Feola has no serious current rival. The American tenor René Barbera joins them in the splashy part of Rigoletto’s employer and Gilda’s seducer, the heartless Duke of Mantua, while the sumptuous Mongolian bass Peixin Chen insinuates himself as the double-crossing hit man Sparafucile, hired by Rigoletto to avenge his daughter’s honor. —Matthew Gurewitsch