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| Fiordiligi (Eleanor Dennis) and Guglielmo (Nicholas Lester) Image: Ali Wright |
Fiordiligi – Eleanor Dennis
Dorabella – Kitty Whately
Guglielmo – Nicholas Lester
Ferrando – Nick Pritchard
Despina – Sarah Tynan
Don Alfonso – Peter Coleman-Wright
Oliver Platt (director)
Alyson Cummins (designs)
Rory Beaton (lighting)
Opera Holland Park Chorus
(chorus master: Richard Harker)
City of London Sinfonia
Dane Lam (conductor)
Absence makes the heart grow fonder;
or does it? In Così fan tutte, who
knows? Or rather, what could such a question even mean? Would it not be a
typically sentimental coping mechanism adopted to avoid confronting the
questions – artificial yet profound, indeed profound through artificiality – it
asks of its characters and its audiences alike? If one does not at some level,
perhaps the most important level of all, find that Così goes deeper and further than Tristan, then one most likely has not understood either. Given a
tragedy without catharsis, a tragedy in the clothes, surpassingly elegant and
ravishing, of comedy: sometimes one might ask who needs an opus metaphysicum at all? (We might actually need it in order to
recover.)
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| Ferrando (Nick Pritchard), Guglielmo, Depsina (Sarah Tynan), Don Alfonso (Peter Coleman-Wright), Fiordiligi, Dorabella (Kitty Whately) Image and subsequent images: Robert Workman |
At any rate, absence had
certainly made my heart grow still fonder when it came to Opera Holland Park.
Not having been able to visit last summer, I returned to what may well be the
most completely successful show I have yet to see and hear there. There is certainly none I would put above it, quite a claim, given that we are dealing with Mozart, the
most difficult of all composers to perform. There is nowhere to hide, on stage,
in the pit, nor indeed in the audience. Nor should there be. Moreover, one had
the sense, whether in production or in musical performance – the distinction is
far from distinct – that this ambivalent, ambiguous, existentially devastating
drama was being enabled, with the lightest of touches, to speak for itself.
That does not happen by itself; there is no room for ‘non-interpretation’, for
some illusory ‘original’. Yet nor did it ever seem that something was being
inflicted on the work. There is room for critique, whether in words or in
performance, yet sometimes, as here, the work is so rich that it both offers
its own and, perhaps, renders it beside the point.
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| Don Alfonso |
For what is Così, if it is not a musico-dramatic laboratory,
a game whose results we should rather not know, and yet can never quite
un-know? We see that in Oliver Platt’s production: not spelled out, ‘in a
laboratory’, but actually more or less where it ‘should’ be, in an
eighteenth-century setting, in which detail is everything. The more we look at
what might seem a straightforward, ‘traditional’ production – and, in a sense,
is – the more we see – and hear. The chorus, which like us watches proceedings
and occasionally participates, is, from the start, a participant and perhaps a
critic. It is not quite the Neapolitan ‘daily passeggio’ of which Leopold Mozart wrote, in a letter quoted by
Helen Wallace in the programme, for that was perhaps too obviously theatrical,
at any rate too bound to a particular stratum of the social hierarchy: ‘in a
few hundred carriages the nobles go out driving in the afternoon until Ave
Maria to the Strada Nuova and the Molo.’ These seem largely to be more ‘ordinary’
people, but what is ‘ordinary’? They are like us, perhaps, but they also remind
us that we need not be ‘like’, or at least identical to, the principal
characters on stage to learn from them. And so, when one looks more closely,
one notices an apparently ‘male’ member of the ‘chorus’ in apparently ‘female’
dress. (S)he brings no particular other attention to himself or herself. There
is no obvious plotline, no ‘distraction’, as some would have it, rightly or
wrongly; there is also no obvious exit strategy for us on heteronormative or
other grounds. Così fan tutti/e; or, mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.
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| Fiordiligi and Ferrando |
All, however, is not always quite what it seems. For the commedia dell’arte painted faces of Ferrando and Guglielmo
are there to start with: visitors,
perhaps, from beyond, yet also in need of external transformation – in Tristan, it would be a potion – in order to reveal
themselves. Interactions between characters, like those between different
chemical elements, are minutely observed, rendering us experimenters of our
own, again whether we like it or not. (At least, so long as we watch and
listen.) One of the problems some people, not unreasonably, seem to have with
this opera is not always appreciating the level of parody, verbal and musical.
And so, when Fiordiligi stands on a chair to assume her pose for ‘Come scoglio’,
that cruel, loving, and in every sense ravishing seria parody, she initially falters, almost falling (not, I hasten
to add, vocally). The watching lovers laugh, and she resumes. All is not quite
what it seems, or perhaps it is. That is largely up to us, yet within the
framework constructed – or rather within the different, intersecting frameworks
constructed, by Alfonso and Despina, by Mozart and Da Ponte, and by production
and performers; as well, of course, as that constructed by our own experiences,
thoughts, and emotions. We are led to deconstruct that terrifying final ‘moral’
ourselves, Mozart’s brusque neo-Classicism the only possible response to Da
Ponte’s seemingly straight hymn to reason. If we do not think about, do not
feel its numerous contradictions, we have no one to blame but ourselves – not
unlike the characters themselves. Is all perhaps precisely what it seems? Yes
and no.
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| Dorabella and Guglielmo |
For it is Mozart above all who
renders this opera such a necessary agony. And it is the musicians who – with
the greatest respect to truly excellent work from everyone else involved,
whether in the theatre, behind the scenes, or somewhere in between – who ultimately
bring that into life. The City of London Sinfonia offered us gorgeous musical
sado-masochism, woodwind one might almost literally have been willing to die
for, strings incisive yet far from without warmth of their own. Dane Lam’s
tempi began on the quick side, never unreasonably so, yet indicative of an approach
one might too readily have taken to be partial. For, as the drama progressed,
as the characters achieved greater delineation, so did temporal differentiation.
Lam’s was a reading that knew where it was going, and thus could afford to take
time on the way – in, for instance, a heartrending ‘Un aura amoroso’.
Not that that would have been
heartrending without an estimable Ferrando, of course; that was not, happily,
something we needed to put to the test, Nick Pritchard balancing with apparent
ease the demands of line and variegation. So too did Nicholas Lester’s
Guglielmo, the bitterness of his disillusion moving indeed, his ‘journey’
perhaps the greatest of all. Eleanor Dennis and Kitty Whately likewise proved almost
infinitely capable both of sisterly affinity and dramatic disentanglement. So
many attributes – sorrow and joy, honour and temptation, simplicity and
complexity – were revealed as sides of the same experimental coin. Lines, unadorned
or subtly ornamented, exuded both clarity and warmth. We knew them, and yet did
not. Sarah Tynan’s Despina was very much the musical catalyst, her cynicism and
her sense of fun both vividly portrayed. If Peter Coleman Wright’s pitch was
sometimes a little approximate, he brought important dramatic truths to his
portrayal of Don Alfonso – perhaps not unlike Francesco Bussani, first in his
line. The chorus, well trained, by Richard Harker, could hardly have done more
to bring their roles, individual and collective, to life.
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| Fiordiligi and Dorabella |
There is method in the madness
one feels at the close; there has to be. And yet, quite rightly, there remains
mystery too. Or, in the ruminations of another operatic character, forced to
confront truths of existence he might rather not – at least not too often: ‘Ein
Kobold half wohl da:/Ein Glühwurm fand sein Weibchen nicht; der hat den Schaden
angericht’t.’ Was Sachs just rephrasing the question? Probably. Are we? Almost
certainly. That does not, however, mean that we are not confronting it, that we
need not do so. Mozart leads us to Wagner, as well as Wagner to Mozart.
