I have been watching the DVD of Cosi fan tutte conducted by the late, much-loved Nikolaus Harnoncourt in which the sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, are portrayed as identical twins.
This is not quite so revolutionary as it sounds - Cosi is an opera nowadays much interfered with - though it adds a perhaps unnecessary degree of visual it also, in a curious way, weakens the impact of Mozart’s most perplexing comedy. Neither Fiordillgi nor Dorabella, sung in this performance by Edita Gruberova and Delores Zieglier, is as dramatically convincing as they often are when portrayed by singers who look quite different from each other, whatever illumination it may be thought to bring to the amorous complexities of the story. It is certainly no improvement on Elizabeth Harwood and Janet Baker in the masterly old Scottish Opera, however marvellously Gruberova voices Per Pieta in Act Two.
So I cannot quite see the point of making the girls so utterly indistinguishable from each other, as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle did in this production, though it certainly adds to the inspired symmetry of Mozart’s flippant yet ultimately heartfelt comedy.
With Harmomcourt in charge of the Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestral accompaniment is admittedly in masterly hands. The touch is light, adroit, sensitive, frivolous where it matters, with as fleet an unfurling of the overture as I have ever encountered. Harnoncourt’s tempi, we should remember, were never fast or slow as a matter of principle, but as a matter of rightness.
But Ponnelle’s filmed version of the opera - where the arias are dubbed and the seascapes are less real than they seem- disappointingly fails to match the DVD of Harnoncourt’s more recent Salzburg Figaro, which is a proper live performance in front of an audience, with Harnoncourt visibly in the pit.
Nor does Ponnelle’s film answer the many questions about Cosi that invariably arise. Do the girls recognise their lovers in disguise or do they not? In one really good recent Salzburg Festival production, available on DVD, they definitely do so, because they have inadvertently witnessed the plans for the plot against them yet the action still moves inexorably to this outcome.
But Ponnelle never makes his position wholly clear. Maybe the girls rumble the plot. Maybe they don’t. But at least, in the end, the eighteenth-century moral is drawn, and Don Alfonso (thanks to Paolo Montarsolo’s knowing portrayal) seems not quite the hard, cruel scoundrel he usually does today. And the lovers - though no more convincing than they tend to be - are allowed their moments of fury when the plot begins to work against them.
Yet Anthony Besch’s perceptive old Scottish Opera production lingers in the memory because it made none of the mistakes made by so many more recent, over-ingenious, over-heated productions of Cosi. Besch’s was a model of truth and wit, and it worked. The sudden startling transition from monochrome to colour at the start of Act Two, and the almost shocking return to monochrome at the end, were perfectly judged. The effect was that of a romantic dream that went wrong but was resolved when reality returned, and the way it did so was surely Mozart’s way. It surpassed any other production of Cosi I have seen, providing a rare moment of operatic magic and exactude and sublimity in the modern history of the work.
16 March 2016.
This is not quite so revolutionary as it sounds - Cosi is an opera nowadays much interfered with - though it adds a perhaps unnecessary degree of visual it also, in a curious way, weakens the impact of Mozart’s most perplexing comedy. Neither Fiordillgi nor Dorabella, sung in this performance by Edita Gruberova and Delores Zieglier, is as dramatically convincing as they often are when portrayed by singers who look quite different from each other, whatever illumination it may be thought to bring to the amorous complexities of the story. It is certainly no improvement on Elizabeth Harwood and Janet Baker in the masterly old Scottish Opera, however marvellously Gruberova voices Per Pieta in Act Two.
So I cannot quite see the point of making the girls so utterly indistinguishable from each other, as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle did in this production, though it certainly adds to the inspired symmetry of Mozart’s flippant yet ultimately heartfelt comedy.
With Harmomcourt in charge of the Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestral accompaniment is admittedly in masterly hands. The touch is light, adroit, sensitive, frivolous where it matters, with as fleet an unfurling of the overture as I have ever encountered. Harnoncourt’s tempi, we should remember, were never fast or slow as a matter of principle, but as a matter of rightness.
But Ponnelle’s filmed version of the opera - where the arias are dubbed and the seascapes are less real than they seem- disappointingly fails to match the DVD of Harnoncourt’s more recent Salzburg Figaro, which is a proper live performance in front of an audience, with Harnoncourt visibly in the pit.
Nor does Ponnelle’s film answer the many questions about Cosi that invariably arise. Do the girls recognise their lovers in disguise or do they not? In one really good recent Salzburg Festival production, available on DVD, they definitely do so, because they have inadvertently witnessed the plans for the plot against them yet the action still moves inexorably to this outcome.
But Ponnelle never makes his position wholly clear. Maybe the girls rumble the plot. Maybe they don’t. But at least, in the end, the eighteenth-century moral is drawn, and Don Alfonso (thanks to Paolo Montarsolo’s knowing portrayal) seems not quite the hard, cruel scoundrel he usually does today. And the lovers - though no more convincing than they tend to be - are allowed their moments of fury when the plot begins to work against them.
Yet Anthony Besch’s perceptive old Scottish Opera production lingers in the memory because it made none of the mistakes made by so many more recent, over-ingenious, over-heated productions of Cosi. Besch’s was a model of truth and wit, and it worked. The sudden startling transition from monochrome to colour at the start of Act Two, and the almost shocking return to monochrome at the end, were perfectly judged. The effect was that of a romantic dream that went wrong but was resolved when reality returned, and the way it did so was surely Mozart’s way. It surpassed any other production of Cosi I have seen, providing a rare moment of operatic magic and exactude and sublimity in the modern history of the work.
16 March 2016.
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