La Scuola degli Amanti – The School for Lovers – was always the subtitle of Mozart’s and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s third collaboration and, accordingly, director Max Hoehn sets Welsh National Opera’s new production in a school. As an educational establishment, it’s decidedly unprepossessing and as cash-strapped as WNO.
Forget any sun-drenched Mediterranean vistas: the single set combines assembly hall, gym and canteen, fish and chips high on the menu. Cut-out Adam and Eve, fateful fruit and serpents suggest the Fall in the Garden of Eden, while biology class is focused on reproduction, pollination via bee and hummingbird, and ancient diagrams of male and female sexual parts. Urinals, wash basins, and changing-room lockers are later wheeled on. So a lot of stuff, plus muddy rugby players, but only two desks.
In his scholastic gown, Don Alfonso, the deeply cynical old bachelor, sung by veteran José Fardilha, appears to have given James Atkinson’s Guglielmo and Egor Zhuravskii’s Ferrando detention; out of the task they’re given emerges his bet with the boys that, once backs are turned, their girlfriends will not be faithful. “All women are the same, fickle, can’t be trusted,” are the lines to be written out 100 times and, in perpetuum, over the centuries.
The fiance-swapping, crisscrossing plot is already knotty enough, but here the disjunct between the absurdly beautiful music and often farcical playing-out of the bet, as the short-trousered sixth-formers go off to war to return prontissimo in fancy-dress, makes it even crazier and ultimately rather crass. WNO’s music director Tomáš Hanus makes amends, conducting with a loving touch, while the two couples are all accomplished enough and well matched vocally for the many wonderful ensembles to offer periodic balm.
As Fiordiligi, Sophie Bevan’s singing is delectable, hardly faltering in this most demanding of operatic roles. At the top, her soprano floats with instrumental purity, there’s a gorgeous bloom to her middle range and she brings a real sense of her character’s emotional turmoil, her second big aria Per Pietà sung as quietly as is viable.
Kayleigh Decker’s Dorabella has more edge to her mezzo, but is a good foil for Bevan. It’s Rebecca Evans who steals the comedic honours: her Despina is canteen-lady cum cleaner, with her various disguises as the doctor practising mesmerism and the notary for the marriage ceremony suitably outrageous, her stylish tone and clear Italian mining all the mischief implicit in Da Ponte’s words.
By the falsely jolly epilogue – nothing all right in the end, each figure standing alone and the couples certainly not back to where they were – what came to mind was the old Welsh proverb Chwarae’n troi’n chwerw: play turns bitter. So, less lessons in love, more a day in the school of hard knocks.
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