Gasps of surprised delight still rise from the audience when the final scene of the Royal Opera’s Masked Ball reveals a tilting mirror-abyss of a multidimensional ballroom, its levels of illusion literally mirroring those of Verdi’s own most painfully and thrillingly ironic of operas.

Mario Martone’s visually spectacular production is back, set in the distant New World Boston of Verdi’s own day (a setting forced upon the composer by the insurrection-sensitive Italian censors). Daniel Dooner now directs its second Covent Garden revival, with an entirely new cast. Nothing can save Martone’s original mirror-conception from itself — and from distracting the audience’s attention at the crucial moment of the assassination with its frantic stage business and choreography. But Dooner needs to work a lot harder, earlier in the evening, at loosening up the stagey exits, entrances and groupings of both the all-important (and vocally excellent) chorus and indeed, the body language of the principals as well.

Verdi called his opera a melodramma; but the emotional truthfulness of his music means that it should never become a caricature of opera itself. So far, this revival comes just too close to that for comfort.

The new Riccardo and Amelia, Ramón Vargas and Angela Marambio, relate to each other more awkwardly than their mutual infatuation demands. Vargas’s tenor, though ardent and resilient, is as rough-hewn as the production itself, and lacks the aristocratic elegance Verdi required. Covent Garden has had quite some Amelias in its day — from Price and Caballé to Mattila and Stemme — and I’m afraid the Chilean soprano, making her house debut and only one year into the role, is simply not in that league. Verdi wanted a forceful lyric voice, not a heavy dramatic soprano whose fortissimo lunges into the top of her register almost cause the mirrors to crack.

Amelia’s husband, the volatile Renato, is sung with properly frightening intensity by the Slovakian Dalibor Jenis. His capacious and richly resonant baritone sometimes seems lodged too far back in the throat for its own good, but once it projects forward it has formidable might and menace. The Russian mezzo Elena Manistina brings Slavic substance and a sinister basso profundo to the part of Ulrica: in contrast to her dark underworld, the stratospheric soprano of Anna Christy, making her Royal Opera debut, animates a delectable Oscar.

Maurizio Benini, conducting, strives in the pit to find the momentum as yet lacking on stage.

Box office: 020-7304 4000, to July 17

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010