Election Section

From its origins about 400 years ago, opera has been conceived as a synaesthetic experience. The voices, the lyrics, the orchestration, stylized acting, costumes, sets and lighting are meant to add up to a total effect on all the senses of the audience. This is what has given credence to the frequent claims that opera is the greatest of arts—because it combines them all in an aesthetic apotheosis. 

Festival Opera’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), playing this Tuesday, Friday and Sunday at Walnut Creek’s Dean Lesher Center, brings the truth of these claims home in a way that more extravagant productions in the great opera houses often don’t. 

The popular caricature of opera as overwrought and cloying unfortunately applies to many of these lavish shows; the audience is left to sort out what elements really worked. Festival Opera’s Un Ballo, however, is a triumph of perfect coordination between cast, orchestra, musical and stage direction and design that results in a stunning overall effect, something that could never be achieved in its particular way by any other means, by any of the other arts. 

Un Ballo is based on an historic incident, the assassination of Sweden’s king, Gustavus III, by Count Ankerstrüm at a masked ball at court during the late 18th century. The opera, with libretto by Antonio Somma, was based on a work by French playwright Eugene Scribe (responsible for the type of “well-wrought” play that’s the model for subsequent commercial theater and screenplays). The setting was changed (note the characters’ Italian names) as regicide was still a sensitive issue. 

In the pit before the stage, dominated by an enormous gilt picture frame, conductor Michael Morgan strikes up the orchestra in the overture, graceful, but with elegiac overtones. He emphasizes the great spectrum of moods that quickly alternate, even crowding in and contradicting one another. The tempo rises and the music is briefly tempestuous, then the lights go up to reveal a tableau of the court within the golden frame, courtly figures striking a pose beneath marble arches and heraldic banners—perfect image of a 19th century academic imitation of an Old Master painting. Each act begins and ends this way. 

This is Romantic opera at its peak. The story is sublime, but also a melodrama from a scandal sheet. King Riccardo is a noble, reckless soul, with a secret, forbidden love whom he looks forward to seeing at the masked ball. Heroic tenor Mark Duffin is a splendid Riccardo, gaining strength as he goes, especially in the second act’s graveyard (and gallows-side) duet with wonderful soprano Hope Briggs as Amelia, his inamorata. Baritone Scott Bearden as faithful nobleman Renato tries to warn the careless, lovelorn Riccardo of a plot on his life, but Riccardo shrugs it off. The unknowing Renato is Amelia’s husband. Here are all the threads of the plot that will twist into tragedy.  

In subsequent scenes, among the fantastic ruins (like the chiaroscuro of a baroque oil painting), gypsy sorceress Ulrica (dramatically powerful mezzo Patrice Houston) reads the palm of the disguised Riccardo and tells him a friend will kill him. Then Riccardo confronts Amelia by the gallows as she gathers a dread herb to help her forget their love. And in a drawing room, Renato condemns Amelia before an enormous portrait of the king (the room in strange foreshortened perspective). Finally, at the masked ball, the plot teases out every bit of emotion and musical color and rhythm possible. 

The cast is uniformly fine, with exceptional support from soprano Aimee Puentes as impish pageboy Oscar (who at one point leaps into the arms of startled Renato), and basses Matthew Trevino and Carlos Aguilar as the somberly dressed conspirators. The chorus, whether as the court or the superstitious subjects attending the gypsy’s prophecies, is very good, presided over by chorus master John Kendall Bailey. 

Set designer Peter Crompton has excelled in his extraordinary conception, abetted by excellent work by lighting designer Matthew Antaky, costumer Vincent, and stage director David Cox, who moved the cast within and outside the proscenium of Crompton’s great gilt frame with a skillful grace that accented the lyric and dramatic features of the libretto. Frederic O. Boulay was director of production. 

The collaboration among all involved—remarkable in that all principals besides Houston, as well as designers Antaky and Vincent, are debuting with Festival—makes Un Ballo in Maschera an event equal to any recently in the several performing arts. 

“Why go to San Francisco?” reads the Lesher Center’s advertisement, “Festival Opera’s here!”—good reason for the rest of us to make it to Walnut Creek. 

Festival Opera presents Un Ballo in Maschera at 8 p.m. July12 and 15 and at 2 p.m. July 17 at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek. $35-$100. Sung in Italian with English supertitles. For more information, see www.festivalopera.com or order tickets at (925) 943-SHOW.›