Royal Opera House
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| Dorabella (Angela Brower) and Fiordiligi (Corinne Winters) Images: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey |
Ferrando – Daniel Behle
Guglielmo – Alessio ArduiniDon Alfonso – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fiordiligi – Corinne Winters
Dorabella – Angela Brower
Despina – Sabina Puértolas
Jan Philipp Gloger (director)
Ben Baur (set designs)Karin Jud (costumes)
Bernd Purkrabek (lighting)
Katharina John (dramaturgy)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Semyon Bychkov (conductor)
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| Dorabella, Ferrando (Daniel Behle), Guglielmo (Alessio Arduini), and Fiordiligi |
At last: something at the Royal
Opera to replace Jonathan Miller’s slapstick onslaught on Così fan tutte, not only the most sophisticated, most profound of Mozart’s
operas, but the most sophisticated, most profound opera of all. (At least, that
is how I feel at the moment.) It broke my heart to hear Colin Davis, conducting
the greatest musical performances of the work (2007
and 2012)
I have ever heard and am ever likely to hear, undermined at every juncture by
Miller’s antics. Alas, the good news is not unmixed. It rarely is, of course;
however, once again, we see and hear a split between music and production: not,
I think, a productive mutual questioning, but just a dissociation. The fault, I
am sorry to say, lay squarely with the production, although it was compounded
by different – both valid, but undeniably different – conceptions of the work
from conductor and singers. I suspect that some issues will be resolved as the
run proceeds, but it is difficult to imagine that they all will be, especially
when it comes to Jan Philipp Gloger’s production – although, paradoxically, I
suspect that the lively young cast might even salvage something from that once
the director is out of the way.
My sole previous encounter with
Gloger’s work had been at Bayreuth. A weak irrelevant Flying
Dutchman did not augur well, but everyone deserves a second chance. Even
in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, I found ‘too many instances where the action,
especially for a relatively small theatre, was on too small a scale properly to
understand, or was simply, at least to me, obscure. I had the sense that there
was a better production waiting to break out.’ Much the same might be said
about this Così fan tutte, save that,
in a larger theatre, especially from the Amphitheatre, some of the problems of
scale are amplified. In both productions, one has a sense of a good idea or
two, anything but original, indeed seen in many other stagings of the work in
question, obscured by both a director who thinks his production is far cleverer
than it actually is, and by a certain lack of basic theatrical craft, the
designs, impressive though they may be, being made in the absence of anything
else, to do, or to try to do, far too much of the work for themselves.
The production begins, reasonably enough, if in wearisomely clichéd
fashion, with an attempt to set up its metatheatrical stance. During the
Overture, a cast in ‘period’ dress – presumably a ‘traditional’ production in
our here and now – takes its bows in affected style. There is an element of welcome
surprise when our real cast, apparently members of the audience, rushes into
the Stalls in fashionable, contemporary – to us – dress, and replaces that on
stage. From the audience reaction, anyone would have thought such an idea had
never been attempted before, whether in Così
or anything else. Members of the audience – one of the worst-behaved, alas,
I can recall – seemed to find that all utterly hilarious, in well-nigh
uncontrollable laughter because some people walked through the stalls of a
theatre whilst others were bowing on stage. They need, I think, to get out a
little more; perhaps, dare I suggest it, they might acquaint themselves with some
less derivative ‘modern’ theatre, in and out of the opera house, if they think
there is anything daring in what they saw here.
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| Guglielmo |
Anyway, in another ‘borrowing’ from other recent-ish productions,
Don Alfonso, who has been on stage all along, and who, for reasons unclear to
me, remains in ‘period’ dress, is revealed as director of both ‘old’ and ‘new’
productions. The play’s the thing. It is one way, not a new way, as many seemed
to think, to address the perceived ‘problem’ with the work. Our Ferrarese
ladies and their nobles play roles in the theatre, in a number of different
settings – the public area of an (our) opera house, a Brief Encounter railway station, a somewhat dated cocktail bar, the
Garden of Eden, the costume department of the house, etc. – and thus suspend
the alleged need for ‘suspension of disbelief’, perhaps the most tiresome
operatic cliché of all.
I am far from convinced that the intricacy and overt
artificiality of Da Ponte’s and still more Mozart’s work, that very artificiality
permitting the most profoundly human predicament to come, unflinchingly to the
theatrical fore, need such ‘help’, but that need not have mattered. The problem,
to reiterate, is that, especially during the first act, the designs are more or
less made to do a good deal of the work that stage direction should be doing.
When we come to a potentially fruitful inversion of roles, as in the Garden of
Eden, it comes across as hapless, not as transgressive or alienating. It is one
thing, often a good thing, to have the audience do some thinking for itself –
not much chance here, given the loud applause from far too many in the middle
of Despina’s ‘Una donna a quindici anni’: can they not hear the music has not
returned to the tonic? – but not at the expense of doing one’s job as director.
Otherwise, we should all simply sit at home with a score and/or recording, and
imagine the work for ourselves. (We often do, of course, but that is not really
what a visit to the opera house is for.) The final emendation, spelled out in
glitzy letters above the stage, to Così
fan tutti does no harm, is perhaps welcome, but again would gain in
strength with something more than a scenic flourish.
Semyon Bychkov’s reading of this most wondrous of Mozart’s scores grew in stature as the evening progressed. No, it was not Colin Davis, but we have to accept, alas, that he is no longer with us. Bychkov’s conducting offered, at its best, an intriguing alternative, although, in the first half hour or so, some of the tempo variations sounded a little arbitrary and the sensuous quality of the music was occasionally undersold. There were no ‘period’ affectations, though, and as Bychkov hit his stride, the laudable flexibility he had always shown felt more ‘natural’ – however artificial a construct that, like the onstage drama, might be. I heard some people complain of ‘slowness’ and can only presume them to have been ignorant of the varied performance history of the work. Very little was ‘slow’, in any meaningful sense, but it was varied, and deeply considered. The lamentable alternative is to make Mozart sound like Rossini; that is a straitjacket we can all do without.
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| Despina (Sabina Puértolas) |
More of a problem was that the singers did not always, again
especially in the first act, sound attuned to Bychkov’s understanding. They
sounded as though they would have been happier in the swifter, less
contemplative performance, impressive on its own, very different terms, which I
had heard last month in Salzburg, conducted
by Ottavio Dantone. Indeed, the Guglielmo, Alessio Arduini, offered the
common link between the casts. I wrote then of an assumption that was ‘proud,
assertive, flawed: just as he should be, whether vocally or in stage manner,’ and
much the same might be said here; Arduini is a fine performer, not just a fine
singer. Daniel Behle proved an estimable successor to Salzburg’s Mauro Peter,
similarly honeyed of tone, ‘Un‘aura amorosa’ as so often a highlight. Corinne
Winters mostly impressed as Fioridilgi, the coloratura well despatched, although
her lower register was occasionally found wanting. The clarity of Angela Brower’s
Dorabella was often married to a subtle richness of tone that was most welcome.
Johannes Martin Kränzle took
to his role as master of ceremonies with commendable enthusiasm and equally
commendable musico-theatrical results. The fussiness of the half-baked concept
was not his fault. Sabina Puértolas proved a spirited Despina, attentive to
vocal as well as theatrical concerns (which is not always the case). Alas,
there remains some way to go before different strands of production and
performance come together.
