Opera review: Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte
MOZART'S Cosi Fan Tutte is an unlikely tale of two young men who bet on the constancy of women and assume different persona in an attempt to seduce each other’s fiancees.
The trick for any director is to make us care for the four of them in the resulting love tangle that ensues.
Of all Mozart’s comedies Cosi Fan Tutte is the one that divides opera-goers. Some decry Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto as cruel and misogynist. Others maintain that Mozart’s glorious music is anything but anti-women and that the soprano gets the best arias.
German director Jan Philipp Gloger, making his Covent Garden debut, emphasises the artifice of the opera by staging it as a series of theatrical set-pieces. This may slide round such questions as to why on earth the girls don’t see through the chaps’ flimsy disguise of stick-on moustaches, but it lessens the emotional impact of what happens when the deception leads to realigned affections.
Gloger has the cynical instigator of the bet, Don Alfonso, as an Age Of Enlightenment philosopher, which keys in with the opera’s subtitle “The School for Lovers”. Costumes and backgrounds (sets by Ben Baur, costumes by Karin Jud) are fantastical.
The overture begins with actors in Mozartian powdered wigs and 18th century dress bowing to applause, as if at the final curtain call. They are interrupted from the auditorium by two couples with smart-phones on a night out, who turn out to be Ferrando (Daniel Behle), Guglielmo (Alessio Arduini), Fiordiligi (Corinne Winters), and Dorabella (Angela Brower).
Johannes Martin Kranzle’s Don Alfonso, working to prove his theory, “Cosi fan tutte” (All women are like that), enlists the help of the maid Despina (Sabina Puertolas), who in Gloger’s version is the barista of a sleazy dive where anonymous men in hats prop up the bar. The action moves on to a 1940s “Brief Encounter” railway station and tearful farewells as the two boys board a steam train as enlisted soldiers, before secretly returning to dupe their fiancees.
The girls’ resistance is worn down in a make-believe Garden of Eden complete with gilded serpent twining round an apple tree. Another stage set of a Poussin-style sylvan glade heralds blossoming romance.
Corinne Winters is superb in Fiordiligi’s famous aria “Per pieta” as she falls in love with the man who in real life is her sister’s fiance. Daniel Behle’s Ferrando is outstanding in his passionately felt “Un’Aura Amorosa”.
Of the less serious pair of lovers, Angela Brower is an ebullient Dorabella and Alessio Arduini a rakish Guglielmo.
At the end, Gloger does not manage to make us care whether the couples return to the original pairing, despite fine singing from the well matched cast. The Royal Opera House Orchestra, under conductor Semyon Bychkov, gives a well-balanced though leisurely account of the score.
The October 17 performance will be relayed live to cinemas as part of the ROH Live Cinema Season (roh.org.uk/cinemas). Cosi Fan Tutte will be broadcast live via BBC Radio 3 on Saturday November 12 at 6.30pm.
Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte Royal Opera Royal Opera House, London WC2 (Tickets: 020 7304 4000/roh.org.uk; £9-£190)
