With a little patience, I have managed to track down what appears to be the new production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte which is being brought to the Edinburgh Festival this year. Though somewhat murkily filmed last summer, it at least provides hints of how it may look at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.
So what is it like? Certainly very different from the first Aix-en-Provence Cosi I ever saw, back in 1965, with Teresa Stich-Randall (looking like Barry Humphries and Tersa Berganza as the sisters.)
The old production was a mostly sunny example of how Cosi used to be staged, with lots of laughs and little despair. But times, as the new production confirms, have changed. The new one is Cosi Fan Tutte as opera seria.
From being a piece of Mozartian frivolity and certainly not his greatest opera - both Wagner and Ernest Newman, we should remember, despised it - it has become the emotional peak of his achievement, quite as good as, if not better than, Figaro and Giovanni, the other comedies to libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The latest Aix version certainly has no doubt about its status. Staged in semi-darkness and entirely indoors in what seem to be mostly windowless rooms, it is strangely phantasmagoric in effect. The disguises - presumably deliberately - are hidden in darkness. The characters seldom look directly at each other. People not directly involved lurk mysteriously in the background. The nudity promised by the Edinburgh Festival advertising is an idle threat. There are no parasols, no placid seascapes; Vesuvius is invisible.
So, it must be said, is the fun of the piece. Guglielmo’s comic aria is like a dirge. Even Despina, impersonating Dr Mesmer, loses her falsetto voice, though she regains it in time to play the notary in the last act. The ending, which I shall not disclose, is not optimistic.
How it works with cast changes and a different conductor in Edinburgh remains to be seen. But it is not uninteresting, though the jury must remain out on whether it is one Cosi too many.
3 June 2016
So what is it like? Certainly very different from the first Aix-en-Provence Cosi I ever saw, back in 1965, with Teresa Stich-Randall (looking like Barry Humphries and Tersa Berganza as the sisters.)
The old production was a mostly sunny example of how Cosi used to be staged, with lots of laughs and little despair. But times, as the new production confirms, have changed. The new one is Cosi Fan Tutte as opera seria.
From being a piece of Mozartian frivolity and certainly not his greatest opera - both Wagner and Ernest Newman, we should remember, despised it - it has become the emotional peak of his achievement, quite as good as, if not better than, Figaro and Giovanni, the other comedies to libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The latest Aix version certainly has no doubt about its status. Staged in semi-darkness and entirely indoors in what seem to be mostly windowless rooms, it is strangely phantasmagoric in effect. The disguises - presumably deliberately - are hidden in darkness. The characters seldom look directly at each other. People not directly involved lurk mysteriously in the background. The nudity promised by the Edinburgh Festival advertising is an idle threat. There are no parasols, no placid seascapes; Vesuvius is invisible.
So, it must be said, is the fun of the piece. Guglielmo’s comic aria is like a dirge. Even Despina, impersonating Dr Mesmer, loses her falsetto voice, though she regains it in time to play the notary in the last act. The ending, which I shall not disclose, is not optimistic.
How it works with cast changes and a different conductor in Edinburgh remains to be seen. But it is not uninteresting, though the jury must remain out on whether it is one Cosi too many.
3 June 2016
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