Così fan tutte
Royal Opera
Phaedra
Barbican
When Jonathan Miller’s production of Così fan tutte was first mounted at the Royal Opera in 1995, it was the Armani clothes which received the most attention. Over the years there have been many modifications, and it now bears little relationship, certainly in the direction of the singers, to its original conception. In this latest revival, under Daniel Dooner, a quite new and I found quite distorting account of Mozart’s most ambivalent masterwork of opera is offered, in which the subjects of Don Alfonso’s experiment are presented as self-conscious poseurs, whereas the source of all the insight and pain in Così is surely their unawareness of their own states of mind, their touching and absurd preparedness to take each of their feelings at its face value. Now the most prominent object onstage, almost the only one, is a full-length mirror into which the characters, especially the girls, constantly peer to ensure that they are going to make the right impression. The word inevitably used in connection with Così is ‘artificial’, but that relates only to the plot that Alfonso devises. The opera is of such compelling power because of the ordinary reality of the characters, their complete belief in the genuineness of unshakeable romantic love. The girls never play-act, while the situation with the two guys is worse still: they begin by being complicit in Alfonso’s scheme, but then their feelings turn out to be unstable too, as we see with piercing clarity in the two seduction duets in Act II.
What Dooner has effected is the replacement of a deep comedy by a farce, with exquisite but irrelevant music attached. Unfortunately, the production isn’t the only cause for complaint this time round. The conductor is Julia Jones, an Englishwoman making her Royal Opera debut, and very bland it is. The overture, which can sound like nothing in particular, sounded just that. The remarkable scoring of many passages, with clarinets in particular giving sometimes a warm sensuality to the score, sometimes a telling acidity or mischief, were too unobtrusive. With as unatmospheric a set as it is possible to contrive, mood and changes of mood have to come from the orchestra, but this was an incident-free account, the only mildly notable feature the mainly swift tempi in Act I, and mainly slow ones in Act II.
The cast is mostly not of familiar names, which does mean that the couples all look almost as young as they should. They are competent, and in the case of Sally Matthews’s Fiordiligi considerably more than that. She went in for immense displays of phoney temperament, and has the voice to carry them off, even in her two huge arias. The two plotters are undercharacterised: William Shimell makes no impression at all as Alfonso, and Helene Schneiderman’s Despina is also, though to a lesser extent, blank. I had better add that I was sitting immediately behind a couple of acute sufferers from ADHD: the male left after half an hour, though he returned for Act II. Deprived of her conversation partner, his companion was reduced to dropping her opera glasses repeatedly and searching for them. I haven’t ever encountered distraction on such a scale.
Hans Werner Henze’s latest last opera Phaedra received its UK première at the Barbican a couple of weeks ago, as the first item in a series of contemporary operas called Present Voices. It was a concert performance, with the Ensemble Modern under Michael Boder. The text is by Christian Lehnert, and it is astonishing that after composing 13 previous operas Henze was unable to see that it is hopeless: wordy, abstract, pretentious, it seemed hardly to relate to the complicated tale of illicit passion between Phaedra and Hippolytus: everyone seemed interested only in making world-historical pronouncements.
The singers, the same as in the German première, sang their music with great conviction, but it didn’t make its way to the audience. As so often, Henze produced vocal lines that constantly promised to become melody but invariably disappointed; and the orchestra did nothing to compensate. The work was composed under conditions so trying that one can only wonder at the willpower which enabled Henze to conclude it, after his Lazarus-like rising from what everyone thought was the dead. Maria Riccarda Wesseling incarnated Phaedra as a harpy, both visually and vocally. John Mark Ainsley delivered nonsense as if he believed every word of it. The three smaller roles of Aphrodite, Artemis and the Minotaur were just as confidently taken. I was reminded of Tippett at his worst in the valiant attempts of all concerned to give substance to vacuity.
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