A Sense of Occasion

Although the Staatsoper Unter den Linden invariably offers an assortment of established names and intriguing stagings in the course of a given season, it is during their annual Easter festival – the Festtage – that they most often assemble the kind of high-profile events that, on paper at least, look unmissable. Certainly there was an air of anticipation surrounding the centrepiece of this year’s festival, a new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, featuring Anna Netrebko and Charles Castronovo; even the small-but-vocal crowd of protesters outside the opera house – apparently unhappy about the presence of Ms Netrebko – only contributed to the sense of the evening being less a performance than an occasion. This sense carried over to the stage – where everyone seemed to be singing as though this was the moment they had been waiting…