A MASKED BALL

This evening I played hooky from choir practice to see the HD telecast of the Met production of Verdi's A MASKED BALL at the Sheppard Grande. (I'd normally see it on a Saturday, but both Saturday broadcasts were on the same day as my ROLT Meetup.) I was interested in seeing it because we recently put it on in concert at Coro Verdi.  With those Verdi operas, the more you learn the music the better it sounds.

A MASKED BALL is the one where King Gustavo (censorship made Verdi change him to a colonial governor, but this production had his original version) falls in love with Amelia, wife of his best friend Renato, who responds by joining a conspiracy to murder him at the ball of the title.  Some great music, including Renato's famous aria "Eri Tu" (a title you find in NEW YORK TIMES crossword puzzles).

It was an odd production.  The minimalist sets, twentieth-century costumes and stylized staging seemed better suited to a modern opera by John Adams or Philip Glass.  Gustavo's mortally wounded in his final aria, yet he manages to stand up in the middle of it.  During the scene where Amelia consults the witch privately and everyone else leaves but a disguised Gustavo lurks, the director didn't do enough to make it clear the king was in hiding:  Amelia and the witch could seemingly see him!

(That reminded me of a scene in William Friedkin's THE FRENCH CONNECTION where Gene Hackman was tailing a drug kingpin, who dined in a fancy restaurant while Hackman was stuck out on an adjacent sidewalk eating a slice of pizza.  As one review pointed out, the kingpin simply has to look out the window to notice there's a guy tailing him!  In Friedkin's eyes, the sheerly obvious contrast of such a scene trumped credibility.)

Oh well, I still think it's a matter of time until the Met starts staging more traditional productions to please the less sophisticated audiences coming to the HD telecasts.