A Sense of Occasion

Jesse Simon

miércoles, 22 de abril de 2026

Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera. Villalobos, director

Berlin, domingo, 29 de marzo de 2026.

Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera. Rafael R. Villalobos, director. Charles Castronovo (Riccardo), Amartuvshin Enkhbat (Renato), Anna Netrebko (Amelia), Anna Kissjudit (Ulrica), Enkeleda Kamani (Oscar), Carles Pachon (Silvano), Manuel Winckhler (Samuel), and Friedrich Hamel (Tom). Staatskapelle Berlin. Enrique Mazzola, conductor

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 for for their entire career – and to the orchestra pit, where conductor Enrique Mazzola drew a performance of immense stature. Whatever else one may have had to say about the evening, it was never lacking in energy.

The staging, by Rafael R. Villalobos, possessed a number of intriguing ideas but also seemed resigned to its supporting role in an evening dominated by voices. The visual world it created served primarily as a backdrop: for the most part the staging seemed content to manoeuvre the singers to the front of the stage in time for their grand arias; and, with only one or two exceptions, any sense of character that emerged came from one’s own knowledge of the libretto, or from whatever incidental details the singers were able to convey in passing. Yet the ease with which Verdi himself was able to transplant the original story from Sweden to Boston suggests that concerns of character and setting were largely secondary to the greater themes – specifically the impossible triangle of love, family and country – that run through most of Verdi’s operas.

Mr Villalobos was nonetheless able to create a setting for the action that was both unconventional and occasionally unsettling. The story unfolded in what appeared to be the 1980s: glitchy cable news broadcasts played on a series of cathode-ray-tube televisions strewn throughout the set, the power-brokers of colonial government had taken the form of men in grey business suits, and, even in the office of a respected public figure such as Riccardo, there was still an ample supply of whiskey and cocaine. The idea that we were squarely in the era of cable television was reinforced by the fact that Riccardo was frequently followed by a cameraman, and that Ulrica’s fortune-telling den had been transformed into an extremely low-budget, public-access phone-in show; when Amelia went out at the beginning of the second act to pick the herb that would cure her of her illicit love, the scene was set at the base of a television transmission tower.

If the staging’s reference points seemed occasionally inauthentic – the dancing punks in the second act looked like a Hollywood costume designer’s exaggerated vision of what a New York street gang might look like – they were at least never laboured. The staging, in any event, seemed to have more on its mind than nostalgic throwbacks. The opening scenes took place in a room with a hole in the ceiling and some blocks of concrete clinging precariously to the damaged re-bar, suggesting that the action was set either during wartime or in the aftermath of some immense catastrophe. It was one of the many visual elements that seemed designed to convey a sense of presiding unease but also, alas, one of the many things that the staging introduced and then neglected to follow up.

There was, indeed, very little in the staging that congealed into anything as solid as a definite critique; it was a compelling visual world that, in the end, was little more than surface. Its most original – and most successful – idea was to transform Oscar not only into a young woman who had chosen to identify as male, but also into the child of Amelia and Renato (the very ‘son’ that Renato offers as a pledge to the conspirators in the first scene of Act Three). Oscar’s grappling with the thorny questions of gender and identity, and Renato’s obvious disapproval – apparently he cared more about the fatherland than being a good father – gave unusual depth to a character who can often seem frivolous: Oscar’s unwillingness to reveal Riccardo’s identity in the third act was wholly redeemed by its undercurrent of spite. But if the treatment of Oscar was admirably progressive – non-binary visibility in an opera is, if nothing else, guaranteed to elicit some hearty booing from the more conservative members of the audience – it seemed to exist in a vacuum, an intriguing idea adrift in a staging unable to support it.

On this evening, however, the staging needed to do little more than provide a reliable space for the vocal performances; for all that Verdi himself was concerned with dramatic effect, there are a handful of his operas that can flourish (or falter) solely on the strength of the singers. Un Ballo is certainly among them: but while the evening could boast a superb central ensemble, much of the attention was necessarily focussed on Anna Netrebko. Ms Netrebko is, of course, one of those rare figures with enough star power to generate excitement through her mere presence, and throughout the evening one was always conscious that they were listening to a well-known singer, rather than the character of Amelia. Whether or not one counts this as a fault depends entirely on one’s own understanding of opera: if one is inclined to view it as pure drama, the presence of an outsized personality might be detrimental; but if one considers it to be a showcase for vocal talent – as it was in Verdi’s day – then ostentation must surely be counted as a virtue.

Ms Netrebko was certainly not alone in offering a performance that favoured dazzling displays of technique over immersion in character, but she was arguably the most prominent, and certainly the most commanding. There was nothing remotely reticent in the finely-crafted pianissimi that emerged from the trio with Ulrica and Riccardo in the first act, which were directed outward to the auditorium rather than inward to the soul of the character. Nor were there many stirrings of anguish to be found in the triumphant cries of ‘Miserere’ that brought her solo scene at the beginning of the second act to its thrilling conclusion. Despite the grand scale of these scenes, she still managed to reserve her finest singing for the third-act aria ‘Morrò, ma prima in grazia’, which was delivered with show-stopping confidence and a tone that possessed the brilliance and cool clarity of a diamond. If technical refinement is the metric by which one judges a performance, then Ms Netrebko’s final aria was unquestionably the most magnificent moment of the evening.

Charles Castronovo, as Riccardo, adopted a similarly extrovert approach, often to great effect. Apart from ‘Di’ tu se fedele’ in the second scene of Act Two, which had a halting momentum and some wilful tempi that prevented it from settling into an easy gait (although one suspects this may have been due more to the vision of the conductor than the singer) nearly every one of his appearances was notable for its engaging manner. The opening ‘La rivedrà nell’estasi’, taken at a brisk pace, was an admirable showcase both for the fullness of his tone and the restraint that kept it in check, while his contribution to the love duet in the second act was charged with ardent energy. His finest moment, however, may have been the solo scene before the ball, in which he traded some of his more outgoing tendencies for a moment of genuine introspection that served as an elegant prologue for the denouement to follow.

Amartuvshin Enkhbat delivered a quietly extraordinary performance as Renato: the generous tone of his low notes and resonant warmth of his higher passages were combined with gently forceful phrasing to transform ‘Alla vita che t’arride’ into one of the highlights of the first act. Nor was his aria in the third act any less distinguished, his anguished prevarications emerging as one of the evening’s most heartfelt expressions of emotion. And while Ulrica appears in only one scene, Anna Kissjudit was nonetheless able to establish the character as a larger-than-life figure, her imposing tone and articulate delivery suggesting more a calculating charlatan than a mystical conduit to the secret workings of fate. As Oscar, Enkeleda Kamani was able to combine a voice of youthful agility with a keen sense of the character’s internal struggle to transform the potentially obnoxious page into something considerably more rewarding.

In an evening that was never short of musical personality, Enrique Mazzola nonetheless made his presence felt. If Mr Mazzola’s previous appearances in Berlin (he is a frequent guest at the Deutsche Oper) have demonstrated a master of taut drama and orchestral precision, his performance on this evening revealed an unexpectedly epic sensibility. Nearly every scene was driven not merely by a sense of dramatic urgency, but also a grandeur that seemed determined to sever any lingering connections Verdi may have had to the tradition of bel canto and situate his score firmly within the romantic spirit of his later operas. The result, if occasionally lacking in the buoyant ease found in some Verdi interpretations, was undeniably invigorating. Indeed, Mr Mazzola’s ability to pace and structure individual scenes so that their climactic moments seemed fully in tune with the contours of the drama was as crucial to the evening as any of the vocal performances.

In the face of such dynamic conducting and such committed singing, it was difficult not to be impressed by the cumulative effect of the various performances. But what works on stage can seem laboured or unbalanced when removed from its original context; the presence of the radio3 mobile studio outside the opera house suggested that the evening was being recorded (it was, indeed, broadcast live), and it would be curious to hear the performance in several years’ time, divorced from both the spectacle of the staging and the unavoidable sense of occasion. Whether or not the evening would survive the scrutiny of repeated listening is a matter for posterity to decide; in the heat of the moment, however, it was undeniably thrilling.