Cosi Fan Tutte – Mozart/Da Ponte, WNO, Birmingham Hippodrome, 10 May 2024:

For the musical performance 5✩✩✩✩✩ for the production itself – 1✩ Review: David Gray.

“Beautiful singing and impressive acting marred by a seriously naff production.”

Cosi Fan Tutte seems to be an opera more than any other that directors like to give a more modern setting. Perhaps it is something to do with the problems presented by the opera’s inherent misogyny? By moving the work to a more permissive era where the behaviour of women is less prescribed, they feel they can focus less on the transgressions of the characters of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and more on the cynicism and cruelty of the other characters.

In some carefully thought-through productions, this works; in others, it does not. This is one of the latter. Director, Max Huehn, seems to have fixated on the word SCHOOL in the Opera’s rarely-used subtitle: A School for Lovers, and literally sets it in a school. Obviously, then, it makes sense for Don Alfonso to be a teacher. Despina is making chocolate at the start of the opera, so she can be a dinner lady. And so on.

But despite this very literal approach, the over all impression is of a story and set of characters shoe-horned into a time and place where they simply do not belong. As a result, the setting casts no new-light, or brings no fresh insights. It is just a place where the action happens - at best irritating, at worst, down-right distracting.

Gimmicks abound. Members of the chorus, portraying uniformly gormless children, periodically invade the stage during moments of high emotional drama and perform random, meaningless acts - like wrapping the cast in hazard warning tape during the stunningly well-performed climax to the Finale of Act I.

This is an enormous shame because the cast and musicians all deserve so much better. The singing is uniformly excellent and at times sublime. Conductor, Tomáš Hanus gives a crisp and incisive reading on the whole; but pulls everything back to shine a delicately coloured spotlight on the singers during their more tender emotional outpourings. The musicality is superb.

Dramatically and vocally the principles are all perfectly cast. They act with commitment and intelligence. Miraculously, despite the bizarre setting, they manage to deliver a meaningful, rich and compelling performance of the story. Their characters are so much more than story book lovers, but flesh and blood people who agonize and suffer and take us on a harrowing emotional journey. So clearly Hoehn knows his stuff as a director: how to work with actors and build characters; how to reach the core of the text; to shape a scene; and to deliver emotional truth.

All of which makes the conceptualising and distracting peripheral nonsense all the more tragic. It just is not necessary. And without it, this beautifully sung and remarkably well-acted production could have been utterly amazing.

Cast

Fiordiligi - Sophie Bevan

Dorabella – Kayleigh Decker

Guglielmo – James Atkinson

Ferrando – Egor Zhuravskii

Despina – Rebecca Evans

Don Alfonso – Stephen Wells

Creatives

Conductor - Tomáš Hanus

Director – Max Hoehn

Designer – Jemima Robinson

Lighting – Mark Jonathan