Light and shade | 30 June 2016

Comedy and tragedy sit close beside one another in Mozart’s operas. Whether it’s the grinning horror of the Così finale — lovers joined, perhaps for ever, to the wrong partners — or the violence and mental instability so barely contained in the flimsy comic fabric of La finta giardiniera, there’s a continuum of emotion that belies the easy binaries of opera buffa and opera seria. Two new productions explore the shifting light of the composer’s chiaroscuro world, letting sunshine into the near-tragedy of Idomeneo and glancing into the darker corners of Le nozze di Figaro.

Washed up on to Garsington Opera’s stage in two enormous shipping containers, Tim Albery’s Idomeneo is a soberly beautiful meditation on exile, loss and sacrifice — Shakespearean-rich despite deep cuts to the score. Gone is the garish sea monster that ravages Crete in Mozart’s original, replaced by a more abstract (but no less terrifying) foe, and even the Old Testament extremity of the climactic scene — Idomeneo’s would-be sacrifice of his son Idamante — is played with a delicacy that horrifies as no blood and thunder could.

But among some very real tragedy — the echoes of the refugee crisis lightly sounded in Hannah Clark’s deft designs, Toby Spence’s Idomeneo wracked with all the self-doubt and conflicting urges of a Peter Grimes — there’s real joy to be found. Caitlin Hulcup’s Idamante, all adolescent awkwardness and intensity, overflows with ardour for his beloved Ilia, reciprocated with shy delight by Louise Alder. Dramatically it’s a near-perfect pairing, finding the youth and even the silliness in two lovers whose sophistication is only a veneer painted on by suffering. Vocally, too, from Hulcup’s impassioned ‘Non ho colpa’ to Alder’s ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’, defiant in its radiant beauty, these are exceptional performances that rise to the challenge of conductor Tobias Ringborg’s speeds and forward-thrusting musical momentum.