Welsh National Opera’s new staging of the opera that crowns the middle of Verdi’s career is musically very fine indeed, with exceptional performances from all its principals. In this second of WNO’s three-year Verdi trilogy, tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones and soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams reinforce the successful pairing of last year’s La Forza del Destino, their singing as distinguished as it is moving. And with skeletons a dominant presence in the final scene, this might be described as a rattlingly good production.
Given that the opera is based on the 1792 assassination of the Swedish king Gustav III – the outcome thus a foregone conclusion – director David Pountney chooses to make death cast its black shroud over proceedings from the outset. It’s playfully done: the king is not on his throne but emerges from a comfortable coffin on top of which his mischievous page Oscar has been lying, with soothsayer Ulrica (Sara Fulgoni) in attendance sitting on the ceremonial bier.
A defining decision with this work is whether this opera is located in Stockholm – Verdi’s first intention before falling foul of censors unwilling to permit the depiction of regicide – or Boston, which finds the king translated to governor, dealing with colonial difficulties. Here it is emphatically the former: Swedish flags are brandished, the setting is the last decade of the 18th century, Raimund Bauer’s design embracing the opera house that the enlightened Gustav founded and where he would ultimately be shot at, yes, a masked ball. Yet, however logical this is, difficulty persists when respect both for the Italian nature of Verdi’s conception and his final compromise means that the king is still called Riccardo, the count, his best friend is Renato, not Anckarström. Such a confusion might be by the by, but with the denouement tweaked in a way that underlines a Gustavian taste for drama and dramatic japes – Riccardo affects a little red book of director’s notes – changing the names back to the Swedish originals would surely have be clearer.
It is Verdi’s neat balance of a comic element with love-triangle passion and the conspiracy to murder that gives this work its edge, but here it seems less a question of finding balance than engineering a collision of these elements: Pountney’s concern to bring out the flirtation with the gothic dictates a gory, ghoulish, Guignol approach to Ulrica’s witchcraft; there are lots of fickle fingers of fate. Everything is vamped and ramped up so as to subvert any notion of glamour in the final titular ball. Male chorus and the conspirators initially sport top and tails in tribute to the familiar drawing of the elegantly top-hatted Verdi but, after the diversion into sailors’ and pirates’ disguise, jokily sinister skulls and skeleton costumes become the masked attire. With such high spirits – Valborg, the Swedish Walpurgisnacht, meets Halloween – and the WNO company singing and acting their metatarsals off, it’s good fun. But, spoiler alert, there’s a twist before the king actually expires.
More crucially, conductor Carlo Rizzi presides over a cast and orchestra on terrific form. Hughes Jones is in excellent voice throughout as Riccardo, albeit diminished by the directorial ending. Williams combines gleaming top and luxuriant richness with wonderful assurance, while Roland Wood is a formidable Renato, and Julie Martin du Theil a strongly mischievous Oscar.
At Wales Millennium Centre 16 and 23 February and touring until 24 April.
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