Così at the Barbican
ENO started its exile at the Barbican with a new and youthful modern-dress production of Così fan Tutte, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth and directed by Samuel West. Even with his theatrical background, West was brave to choose Così for his debut as an opera director. The 19th-century critic Eduard Hanslick thought it not viable for the stage, since audiences could no longer swallow "the extended blindness" of the two heroines, unable to recognise the lovers "that they have embraced but 15 minutes before." He had a point. The challenge to the director, though, comes not from the artificiality of the plot, but from Mozart's making out of it an opera in which the border between pretend and real emotion is so porous. The libretto makes it tempting to play things as cynical burlesque, but this would be to subvert the music and thus the opera. The audience must be able to take the characters, and their situation, sufficiently seriously to find themselves moved by their responses.
West's own solution, unfortunately, makes dramatic nonsense of much of the second act. Rather than following the libretto, in which the sisters do not discover until the end that their new suitors are their fiancee in eastern disguise, he has them take off the men's disguises during the finale of act one. One can see the temptation for this. It removes the need for the audience to suspend disbelief during the seductions of the second act, as well as providing a heightened context for Fiordiligi's conflicting responses to Ferrando's advances. The trouble is that it leaves the audience unable to make sense of much of what is actually said. So many of the exchanges between the sisters assume that they do not know who their new suitors are that one became increasingly unsure whether they did know or not. Così's emotional depth comes from the ambiguity of the characters' responses to their situation: to make that situation ambiguous is to forego depth for fog.
This was a shame since there was nevertheless much to admire in the direction. For an opera director, West showed an unusual interest in the score. He noticed, for instance, that at the end of the overture Mozart cites the motif that he will later use for Alfonso to draw the moral from which the opera gets its title, and had the soldiers present their fiancee to Alfonso at just that moment. Indeed, most of the first act had a tremendous panache, not least because of Jeremy Sams's translation, which was witty and well enunciated (although to have Don Alfonso groping the sisters in Soave sia il vento was an unnecessary vulgarity). Wigglesworth, fresh from conducting Figaro at Glyndebourne this summer, manifested the same virtues of detail and pacing as he did there.
Apart from the designer Alison Chitty's wonderful blocks of colour, however, there was a distinct absence of sensual pleasure. Colin Lee as Ferrando displayed an impressive delicacy of phrasing, but the timbre of his voice left "Un'aura amorosa" sounding more religious than erotic. Again, Mary Plazas as Fiordiligi had a fine technique but not the vocal reserves to allow one to relax into her two great, but necessarily virtuoso, arias. The orchestra too seemed at the edge of its tonal resources-which matters since Così demands almost as much of the wind players as it does of the singers. In contrast, Andrew Shore was a vocally and dramatically assured Don Alfonso, nicely suggesting that his beliefs about the nature of human affection were not acquired without pain. The central performance of the evening, however, was Alison Roddy as Despina. With both the voice and the technique for the part, she quite dominated the stage. A great Despina is a wonderful thing in a production of Così, but the most memorable moments will not be hers if the production has done justice to the emotional complexity and musical beauty of Mozart's vision.
The orchestral season
The domestic orchestral season started strongly. At the Barbican, Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a concert that began and ended with Sibelius. If he did not quite manage to make Tapiola into a single unified utterance as, say, von Karajan could, he did produce a fine and surprising performance of the 6th symphony in which he found a contrapuntal and harmonic interest neglected by more traditional pastoral readings. The BBC strings, trenchant and alert, responded vividly and the brass with subtlety.
Less happily, Kurt Masur and the LPO kicked off their Brahms cycle at the Royal Festival Hall with a performance of the 1st symphony that found the orchestra sounding bored and unbalanced while Masur danced genially in front of it. The leaden phrasing and ragged ensemble will have enraged anyone who looks to the work to provide one of the great symphonic experiences. Fortunately, there was only a four-day wait before Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Philharmonia restored honour by giving a performance of the symphony that was much closer to the real thing. With relatively swift speeds, Dohnanyi elicited a concentration of expression, especially in the slow movement, that gripped. There may have been grander, more brooding accounts of the introduction, but even here he found felicities of phrasing to compensate. His care over the balance of the inner parts animated the whole sound of the orchestra. Perhaps the fastidious regretted that the strings do not have quite the degree of richness they had a few years ago, or that there was still a slight tendency for the brass to dominate, but the Philharmonia was definitely on form.
