Charles Mackerras's 80th birthday fell last Thursday, and after a remarkable year of celebratory performances, he opted to mark the day itself by conducting the Royal Opera's revival of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. It was, of course, something of an event. There were tributes in the programme and speeches after the performance. He was given a birthday cake with 80 candles. Soprano Nina Stemme helped him blow them out. "She has more air than I have," he remarked, with characteristic humour.
Yet for all that, it wasn't quite the great occasion one had hoped for. As with Mackerras's Glyndebourne performances of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte last May, the overall impact was hampered by uneven casting and a staging that failed to do the work justice. The latter, the work of film director Mario Martone, keeps the Boston setting foisted on the composer by the censors, rather than locating the work in Sweden as Verdi envisaged. The action is slewed forward in time to the years following the American Civil War. Martone has much to say about a society trying to re-orient itself after catastrophe, though in the process he loses sight of the complex psychology of the protagonists and of the opera's unique tone, which holds passion, tragedy and farce together in perfect balance.
The problem is also compounded by an indifferent central performance from Richard Margison as Riccardo, gracelessly sung, and never suggesting that this is a man who embodies a fatal combination of governmental brilliance and anarchic wit. He leaves a void at the centre of the work, for which greatness elsewhere fails to compensate. Dmitri Hvorostovsky's Renato is a wonderful portrait of a man so obsessed with concepts of honour that he loses sight of reality. Nina Stemme's Amelia is glorious in her combination of vocal majesty and understated theatricality, and there's a telling Ulrica from Stephanie Blythe, maintaining to the last the ambiguity as to whether the woman possesses genuine prophetic powers or is simply a fraud.
Mackerras has a perfect understanding of the score's gradations of mood, above all those extraordinary moments when comedy suddenly - but almost imperceptibly - swerves towards nightmare. One just wishes that the rest of the evening matched his vision.
· Until December 10. Box office: 020-7240 1200.
