Fiordiligi – Madeline Braham
Ferrando – Osian Wyn Bowen
Dorabella – Shakira Tsindos
Guglielmo – Paul Grant
Don Alfonso – Paul Carey-Jones
Despina – Elizabeth Karani
Director – Cecila Stinton
Designs – Neil Irish
Lighting – Robert Price
Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Lindsay Bramley)
City of London Sinfonia
Charlotte Corderoy (conductor)
Così fan tutte may be my favourite opera; it is certainly one of those about which I am touchiest. To have me come away from a performance not verging upon spitting blood is rarer than it should be: doubtless a reflection on me as well as much contemporary Mozart staging and conducting. At any rate, there was no such problem here at Holland Park: no need for a transfusion of any kind, and an intelligent, enjoyable production and performance of a Neapolitan warmth to belie London’s torrential downpour, plunging temperatures, and transport misery.
Doubtless we romanticise the past. Societies often have, though equally often they have trashed it—and continue to. The idiocies that abound in contemporary liberal discourse on the Enlightenment are frustrating, not least given their flattening effect on a movement far more varied, diffuse, and interesting than the Guardian letters page to which it is too often reduced. Their defamation is nonetheless less grievous than those served up then and now concerning the Middle Ages. Da Ponte and Mozart’s Naples shows more things in heaven, earth, and indeed somewhere warmer still than any ahistorical philosophies might dream of, Its strikingly ‘modern’ laboratory treatment, musically as much as verbally dramatic, and a key to understanding its nineteenth-century rejection is balanced and/or contested by the quackery of Mesmerism; sadly, the theological heart beating at its core remains ripe for rejection or straightforward incomprehension by bears of insufficient historical imagination.
What of more recent ages? Like any period, the 1960s will suggest different things to different people, indeed different things to the same people at different times. In Cecilia Stinton’s production, however, there was a degree of postwar glamour and prosperity evoked through intercontinental tourism, in this case by a pair of US American women, both to be deceived by and yet also assert a degree of vengeance upon their soldier lovers and their hosts and hostesses. Titles help further establish the new world, knowingly distant in a world of ‘Yanks’ and the like from Da Ponte’s Italian. Despina and Don Alfonso navigate the show from the airport onwards, taking us to the fatally named Hotel Caligula to a Pompeii that has more than a little of the overseas Italian restaurant to it. One sees what one expects rather, necessarily, than what is there: surely a considerable part of the point. A romanticised view of a Roman antiquity that never was, yet which governed much of our self-understanding, both as individuals and societies, in the eighteenth century as now, comes to life through disguise, games, and commercial and other forms of exploitation. Statues come to life or turn to death, but will anyone notice? Perhaps they are mere plaster-casts anyway, if indeed that matters. It is necessary to complete at least an initial course from the (summer) school for lovers even to be aware that one has taken it.
And all is accomplished with a greater sense of humour than I have seen for some time. If my view of the work is darker, Stinton’s conception convinces and, yes, entertains, as well as turning the tables, without ever neglecting – as so many do – the difficult, necessary lessons of which travel, tourism, and ‘heritage’ are mere vehicles of passion and, ultimately, Passion. There is proper bleakness at the end, as Mozart’s chillingly perfunctory, automaton-like close shows up the surface meaning of Da Ponte’s ‘moral’ for what it is. Mock-heroic gestures and acts have throughout performed a similar role, bringing Mozart’s horrifying parodies to scenic life for those who might otherwise take them at face value—or not even notice. It is a difficult work for many, precisely because of its musical suppositions. A helping hand here does no harm at all, especially when the titles veer in another, less literal direction. If we are all Romantics as well as romantics now, that only renders our need to learn from those who were not, or who were less straightforwardly so, all the greater.
Mozart’s ambiguity is absolutely fundamental to the drama, nowhere more so than in his orchestral writing and long-term harmonic plan. Few have understood and communicated this so well as Sir Colin Davis, and no one in my theatrical experience. But again, whether we romanticise the past or not, we cannot live in it. Charlotte Corderoy’s conducting of the City of London Sinfonia was warm and broadly sympathetic, supportive of the singers yet leading them as necessary. Tempi were often, though not always fast without being harried. Ensembles are numerous in Così, presenting musical as well as dramatic challenges; there were, as is often the case, a few instances of disjuncture between pit and stage, but nothing grievous and swiftly, decisively remedied. Balance, moreover, was generally impeccable. There was, moreover, a palpable sense of staging and musical interpretation having been conceived and proceeding as one, not least in emphatic, if far from exclusive, tilting of the scales towards comedy.
Such collaborative, collegial work was also a hallmark of the vocal performances. Madeline Braham was a wonderful Fiordiligi, finely supported by both director and conductor, yet with a fresh and thoughtful artistry very much her own. Shakira Tsindos’s Dorabella proved a proper foil: both contrast and complement in musical and dramatic terms. We felt as well as observed a growing division as well as distinction between them, as also between Osian Wyn Bowen’s Ferrando and Paul Grant’s Guglielmo. These lively, human portrayals were well framed and complemented by Paul Carey-Jones’s Don Alfonso and Elizabeth Karani’s Despina: both hugely charismatic performances, often in tandem with the excellent chorus—and Despina’s own troupe of adoring ragazzi (shades of Zerbinetta). Coloratura held no fear for anyone, all of whom knew how to put it to excellent dramatic as well as musical use. And in this, arguably the ensemble opera par excellence, the whole was quite properly more than the sum of its estimable parts.
