Un Ballo in Maschera, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Jan. 9 2013

We couldn’t get to the live performance of Un Ballo on December 8; thank goodness for encores. Many other people must have been in a similar situation—attendance was much better than for most encores.

The production, by David Alden, was a strange one. For starters, the action had been moved from colonial Boston back to Stockholm (the original setting was supposed to be Stockholm, but the censors objected to a regicide on stage, so Verdi and his librettist recast Eugène Scribe’s play to be set in Boston). Therefore, in this production, Riccardo the governor of Boston reverted to Gustavo the king of Sweden. Renato, the king’s best friend, became  Count Anckarström, but still he was sometimes called Renato. Ulrica became Madame Ulrica Arvidsson. Amelia and Oscar survived unchanged.

The pre-performance curtain was a Baroque-style painting of Icarus falling from the sky after the wax holding his feathers together had melted. When the curtain rose for the prelude, the Icarus theme was repeated. The ceiling (which sloped from on high downstage to near stage level upstage) had the same painting; during the prelude, Gustavo paced the stage while a dimunitive Oscar, equipped with wings, performed a pantomime. The set was basically a box, with a semi-shiny floor, walls to the left and right, and as mentioned the ceiling sloping downwards from front to back. With all this reflecting surface, I’m sure that the singers could easily be heard in the far corners of the opera house. The chorus was made to engage in exceptionally strange actions: at one point they pushed steel-gray desks around on stage; at the end of Act 1 Scene 1 they performed a “song and dance” number that looked as though it belonged in Radio City Music Hall. At the end of the act, the Icarus ceiling was raised at the rear to become nearly horizontal and to reveal the facade of a brick office building, with two stories of regularly-spaced windows. Huh?

Act 2, in the graveyard, fared equally poorly. We saw the same walls left and right as we had seen in Act 1. These walls were covered with a light gray on almost white pattern that looked roughly like a Rohrschach inkblot repeated over and over again. The same Icarus ceiling was still there. The semi-shiny floor was still there, but this time about four panels the size of a sheet of plywood had been set at angles to the rest and laid over holes in the stage, signifying graves. The gallows was nothing more than a 10-foot tall I-beam, broken off at the top. The same leather easy chair that appeared in all of the acts was here in the graveyard. At the end of the act, the Icarus ceiling was again raised to near horizontal, this time revealing a black-and-white photo of homes and trees and telephone poles silhouetted against the horizon. Huh?

In Act 3 Scene 1, the confrontation between Count Anckarström and his wife, Amelia, took place in a smaller box: floor, close-in walls, low-hanging ceiling sloping down to the rear. It was a black-and-white box, with black areas meeting white areas at unusual angles not related to room boundaries. Huh? It took the stagehands several minutes to take this little box apart and set up the final scene. Here, in addition to the Icarus ceiling, a cardboard cutout of Icarus’s fall hung from above. In back we saw, at times, a half-tone image of vast Roman arcades and columns, and at times the same image (maybe) as distorted by a fun-house mirror. The walls to the left and right were mirrors, with distorted images. Again, huh?

Our cast:

Amelia Anckarström: Sondra Radvanovsky
Oscar: Kathleen Kim
Madame Ulrica Arvidsson: Stephanie Blythe
King Gustavo III (Riccardo): Marcelo Álvarez
Count Anckarström (Renato): Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: David Alden
Set Designer: Paul Steinberg

The wretchedness of the production was almost overcome by the superb cast. Marcelo Álvarez had come to my attention in the Met’s Tosca of 2009; he was just as outstanding here. Stephanie Blythe appeared in only one scene, but she absolutely made the most of it. Sondra Radvanovsky (equipped with blood-red lipstick) has got to be one of the world’s leading Verdi sopranos. Dmitri Hvorostovsky built up to an overpowering performance in Act 3. Perky little Kathleen Kim made a fine Oscar. Almost an alpha on the singing, but the production is only worth a gamma.