...it's a wonderful word, tra-la-la-la [=> Marx Brothers]. Meanwhile, the ambiguity of the great Così fan tutte is laid on with the proverbial trowel at Covent Garden. I've reviewed it here for the Critics' Circle reviews site. And found it...a bit così-cosà.
Just to add, though: it has had a lingering aftertaste. The music has stayed with me in a way that it rarely has before - the sheer sublimity of it. And whenever I run into to someone else who also saw and heard it that night, they say more or less the same thing. They come out thinking, as I did, "My God, I love Mozart so much..." - which means that someone is doing something very much right, and probably on the conductor's podium. Thank you , Semyon Bychkov!
Taster:
The music of Così is so sublime it’s a difficult show to
ruin. However often a production flies in scenery during the most
beautiful passages – I could have lived without the brightly-lit cinema
frame descending from the heavens in the middle of ‘Soave sia il vento’ –
Mozart transcends everything. In this new production, the Royal Opera
House debut of the German director Jan Philipp Gloger, that’s just as
well.
Two young couples arrive at the front of the stalls as the cast of an 18th-century opera (Così fan tutte?)
take their curtain calls during the overture. One of that cast, our Don
Alfonso, whisks the two boys up to the stage and makes a bet with them
that he can prove their beloveds – selfie-snapping and hard-drinking
girls – are unfaithful. Don Alfonso transforms into a movie director and
the young people act, and act some more while scenes morph around them:
a wartime farewell under a station clock, a bar in which the cynical
Despina, devoid of morals and goodwill, shakes the cocktails, and a
Garden of Eden with green plastic snake (aha: temptation! No, really?)...
Read the rest here.
