Approximate Running time: 3:54 Verdi’s vivid drama of jealousy and vengeance will be seen in a new production by acclaimed opera director David Alden, returning to the Met for the first time in more than 20 years. Fabio Luisi conducts his first Met performances of the opera, which stars Karita Mattila in her Met role debut as Amelia, Marcelo Álvarez as Gustavo III, Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Anckarström, Stephanie Blythe as the fortuneteller Ulrica, and Kathleen Kim as the page Oscar. Alden, whose production is set in a dreamlike, early 20th-century Swedish environment, says that “Un Ballo in Maschera is one of Verdi’s greatest and most brilliant scores, with a variety of different colors. It alternates between the light and the intensely melodramatic. Verdi pulls it all together with unbelievable theatrical energy. Ballo is theatrical dynamite.”