Mozart: Cosi Fan Tutte – ROHCG  01/07/22 

DIRECTOR, Jan Philipp Gloger; SET DESIGNER, Ben Baur; COSTUME DESIGNER Karin Jud; Conductor Julia Jones; Fiordiligi, Jennifer Davis; Dorabella, Julie Boulianne; Ferrando; Bogdan Volkov; Guglielmo, Gordon Bintner; Despina, Serena Gamberoni; Don Alfonso, Lucio Gallo 

It was lovely to hear Cosi Fan Tutte live again in the opera house – it must be more than 10 years since I last heard it (my Friends account said I went to a performance in 2010 at Covent Garden – if I did, I have zero memory of it), and it was glorious to be reminded of the wonderful moments in the work: the big arias for Fiordiligi and Dorabella, the bounce of the big ensembles, the wonderful music for Despina.  

This production though is problematic because it doesn’t recognise that this is an essentially silly story, with characters little better than puppets, for whom Mozart has written glorious music. Part of the point of the work is the musical compassion Mozart wraps around these characters and this story. Unfortunately, the director, Jan Philipp Gloger, doesn’t take that as a given but creates a play within a play within a play scenario which not only does your head in but is unnecessary, really. The overture shows an 18th century-dressed ‘standard’ cast for Cosi receiving curtain calls. Two arguing couples in modernish dress – the men modern, the women looking more 50’s-ish – are sitting in a stage box arguing about the performance. At the end of the overture Don Alfonso invites them onto the stage to ‘be’ Dorabella, Alfonso, Fiordiligi and Ferrando. The idea therefore is that they are conscious throughout the performance we see of the artificiality of the story, and they are consciously taking part in the acting they are undertaking as a result of their wager with Don Alfonso – if you see what I mean……The sets are then variants on a self-consciously stagey set, not really linked with each other except for sometimes when there are lights at the back as though the auditorium was at the back of the stage, and the linked theme of an inner proscenium arch. The set changes too are very self-consciously done, and there are occasionally irritating Brechtian signs popping up. I thought it was quite clever in its way but it was very difficult to fully appreciate the different layers in any meaningful way, not least because the libretto gives no hint of this interpretation and so the characters don’t speak of it. I suspect maybe Gloger might have fiddled around occasionally with the language of the recitatives, but there is no obvious way – and Gloger doesn’t really seek to create it – we can understand what the couples have ‘learned’ at the end of the work interpreted like this. Some of the sets are quite striking – the Act 1 train station, Act 1 sleazy bar, the Eve tree with the snake around it, the 19^th century pastoral set in Act 2 – and clever, bur really with little ultimate point to them – at times they had an almost Met-like feel of ‘doing it because we can’, like the bedrooms slowly rising from beneath the stage. At the end of the day, I don’t actually feel that Cosi has that silly a story – OK, it is perhaps not very credible that the two women don’t recognise their blokes in disguise, but you just go along with the artifice of the plot and enjoy, as I’ve said, the wonderful music which gives the characters such presence and humanity 

Musically and in terms of the cast’s acting this was a bit of a mixture. The stand-out star was Despina, Serena Gamberoni, who was a great singing actor, completely credible in the role and with a very good voice sensitively handled. I also though Dorabella, Julie Boulianne, had a beautiful voice, and her big Act 2 aria was varied and impressive in line, agility and dynamics. Jennifer Davis could not erase memories of Margaret Price singing this live at Covent Garden in the dim and distant past, but was good enough, as were the men, particularly Don Alfonso. Julia Jones’ conducting I had a lot of problems with – my usual complaint with Mozart conducting: it was all rushed, so that the music didn’t ‘bounce’ properly and, though there was a little boy near me kicking his seat in time to the music, there wasn’t the rhythmic propulsion there should have been. The horns sounded oddly tentative in the big Dorabella aria, and the ensemble was surprisingly often a bit ragged. Even so, there were some beautiful moments from the orchestra, particularly the oboe.

But, while I had all these grumbles, at the end of the day it was so good to hear this work live again (particularly as I’d missed, when I had had Covid, the (I suspect better) production at ENO in March).