Musical treat

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 3rd June 2009

Così fan tutte
English National Opera

After many productions of Mozart’s bleak comedy Così fan tutte, there has been a hiatus, welcomely brought to an end by ENO, which brought the first operatic production of the great Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami from Aix-en-Provence. Denied a visa by the imbecilic British embassy in Tehran, he had his work restaged by Elaine Tyler-Hall. I have no idea what it was like originally, but it is hard to believe that it was quite as blank as what we saw at the Coliseum, which really was not a production at all, but merely costumed characters strutting around in the way they would if there was no one to tell them what to do.

The staging, however, was a treat to look at. With extremely clever use of film, we had a three-dimensional scene of sea, cliffs, and an approaching boat, and later of the orchestra and the conductor, placed behind the singers. No Vesuvius, though, which is what is specified in the text and what the work cries out for. The cast was mainly of the level one might hope for at a music school, young people with pleasant voices, but not yet with the means of expressing much with them, or of co-ordinating their singing and acting. The exceptions were the saturnine Steven Page, best know as Sweeney Todd, as Don Alfonso, and the superb Susan Gritton as Fiordiligi. She not only coped with all Mozart’s notorious vocal demands — the role was originally sung by da Ponte’s mistress, a specialist in leaps — but added quite a few of her own, and also managed to prevent ‘Per pietà’ from being a longueur. Unfortunately, as happens in these circumstances, she and Page made clear what the others were missing. The less impressive four were not disastrous, but the Coliseum is far too large a theatre for their voices in their present state, and the Ferrando, who has some of Mozart’s loveliest tenor music, just seemed an English bleater.

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