Great festival of voices last night at the Liceu! And what an immaculate orchestral direction by Riccardo Frizza in this complex Ballo in maschera so rich in colors, intimate tones and contrasts of emotions! The audience at the Gran Teatre didn't stop clapping with delight after each aria, each duet - especially the love between Amelia and Riccardo, when she dares to declare herself in love -, or after those miraculous trios and other moments of ensemble offered in turn with the lyceist choir perfectly aligned.
This mature Verdi (1859) reaches unsuspected heights of beauty with a fabulous cast like the one that the Barcelona lyrical coliseum has procured, with the absolute diva Anna Pirozzi, what an excellence of soprano!; the debutant Freddie De Tommaso, a fabulous tenorial diamond who will surely bring joy in the future!, plus this baritone who is an ace of the measure in the hateful role of Rennato, the loyal friend of the king (Riccardo) and offended husband of Amelia who decides to kill the monarch... Although listening to it in the voice of Artur Rucinski even his "Adultery!" are forgiven, the "there is no crying that can excuse so much guilt" and " pray to God for mercy”.
And without forgetting, of course, the much-loved Sara Blanch in the role of Oscar, that Oscar who here is said to flow from gender to gender... from man to woman and vice versa... "I only see a girl beautiful, listen", said a lady returning to the audience after the intermission.
The libretto, which records the true case of the murder of King Gustav III of Sweden in the palace during a masquerade ball, was already a little rare - censorship forced it to be recreated in Boston (on another continent), making the king as governor – as if for the audience to fit the radical contrasts: a court dressed in the Victorian fashion that immediately gives way to the queer party that takes place in the lower depths, where a pythoness reveals to Riccardo that he will be killed by the first person who shakes his hand.
Showy and subversive were the terms used to define this production based on an idea that Graham Vick was building during the pandemic, when he unfortunately died of covid. And it is the only one that has been seen - except for the one presented in 2017 by the designer Christian Lacroix - since that famous montage by Calixto Bieito that put high school students on guard, irritated by the realism of the toilet scene in which corrupt politicians defecated while planning the assassination.
The conspiracies and revenges are now staged by Vick's collaborator, Jacopo Spire. And showy it is, perhaps because it resorts to the plasticity of queer costumes, to the classic operatic pantomime and to those dances that have to compensate for a slightly hesitant direction of the actors that greatly detracts from the drama. As for subversive... it would be more difficult to determine whether the quarrelsome tension in Fassbinder still shakes any narrow minds...
A foreboding tomb – with a guardian angel included – that moves on a rotating platform presides over the scenography which, due to covid, once placed the choir in a circle and high. Something that, even without restrictions, has its meaning.
But it is the elegance and musical beauty that predominates - and makes you forget the low cost curtains that the scene uses. Verdi was looking for a new language. A new approach. I wanted something intimate, simple. Something to remember the Bellini of La sonnambula or the Donizetti of Linda di Chamounix.
"It's easy to provoke", was the title of the late Roger Alier in his review of Ballo in maschera at Christmas 2000. It was the second season of Liceu de Tots. And this all also included the saba nova that was taking over the Barcelona theater scene at the dawn of the 21st century, with a visionary Bieito paving the way for the rest of European lyrical coliseums. And although no one would convince Roger Alier otherwise, even today, yesterday there was nostalgia in the Gran Teatre for a production that brought more juice to that fatal intersection between love and politics.
In the Saló dels Mirrors, the Cabagnon suite N.º 2 by the artist Iván Forcadell, a native of Alcanar, in the Ebro Delta, paid tribute to all those generations of farmers who were never able to set foot in the Liceu. Timely reflection at the time of the tractor ride along the Diagonal.
