Fulfilling Mozart

The Royal Opera has revived David McVicar’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro after only five months, but already with a ‘revival director’, Stéphane Marlot, who has modified a fair number of details, but not, unfortunately, the over-busyness of some of it, including the Overture, during which we see huge numbers of servants bustling and indulging in very McVicarish horseplay.

However, since Colin Davis is conducting, the obvious thing is to close your eyes for four minutes and hear that hyper-familiar piece delivered with incomparable verve and an underlying threat of insurrection. It is wonderful how, throughout, Davis illuminates the opera without any nudging, gear-changing, strange emphases. He has reached, anyway in Mozart, a plateau where he releases the music and makes one temporarily relapse into the nonsense of thinking that one is hearing the score without intervention from an interpreter. He has an almost uniformly first-rate cast, largely different from and in key roles superior to the first cast.

Above all, thanks to the singing if not quite so much to the acting of Soile Isokoski, the Countess takes her place at the serene and troubled centre of the work. She is admirable in ensemble, especially in the opera’s closing minutes, but it is her two arias that one is unlikely ever to hear sung as beautifully on the stage as they are here. The Count of Michael Volle is less commanding, though not seriously; his great explosion of possessiveness and rage in Act III lacked bite, a little, though if I have a criticism of Davis it is that his reading is occasionally soft-grained. Anyway, it was one of those performances where with (almost) everything being steered so well, individual singers mattered less than they do when the conducting is unsatisfactory; or one takes less notice of their finer points.