patrikpen: Mixed Feelings in Music and Vision 28 June

giovedì 22 settembre 2016

Mixed Feelings in Music and Vision 28 June

Mixed Feelings

Mozart's 'Così fan tutte',
reviewed by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

The 2015-16 symphonic season of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia concluded with two non-subscription concert performances of Così fan tutte, the Mozart / Da Ponte dramma giocoso. The opera had been conceived for Vienna's Burgtheater, an elegant small setting still in use mostly for plays; it seats an audience of some six to eight hundred as against the nearly three thousand that can be accommodated in the huge Sala Santa Cecilia. Thus, the orchestra and the chorus were much larger than those indicated in the original score. Semyon Bychkov was the conductor; he is mostly known for his effective and strong direction of Verdi and Russian composers. He and some members of the Rome cast will perform a fully staged version of Così in September at Covent Garden in London, with Jean Philip Gloger as stage director. I attended the 23 June 2016 performance.

Rather than being a concert version, the performance was a mise en espace in that the singers were acting, albeit without stage direction, sets or costumes. Also, much of the recitative was cut, which made it difficult to fully follow the plot and the sophisticated symmetric game of love, jealousy, betrayals and conquests. The plot is quite well known as the opera was recently reviewed in fully-staged productions in Germany and Italy ('Alive and Well', 31 December 2013 and 'A Real Triumph', 14 August 2011) as well as in the Haus für Mozart at the Salzburg Festival ('New Directions', 31 August 2013). It is also well known that the opera's real values and qualities were only appreciated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Until then it had been considered a heartless farce clothed in miraculous music.

The instrumentation is an important part of these values and qualities. The use of B flat trumpets in lieu of horns, the imaginative utilization of woodwinds, the application of string mutes and the exploration of a wider than usual range of keys and key relations all create an unprecedented voluptuous coloring. This was somewhat lost, either because of the size of the Sala Santa Cecilia or because of the large orchestra or due to Semyon Bychkov's heavy baton and a style which lacked the elegant ambiguity of Mozart's score. The lightness, yet married with cruelty, was lost in translation to a mise en espace in a larger-than-life auditorium. Semyon Bychkov should pay attention in view of the September performances in London's Royal Opera House with a capacity for an audience of one thousand eight hundred, still excessive to fully appreciate Così's jewels of orchestration. A lighter baton would, no doubt, help.

The full cast at curtain calls for Mozart's 'Così fan tutte' in Rome. Photo © 2016 Riccardo Musacchio & Flavio Ianniello

The singers were of good-to-excellent levels — especially the men's group, which also acted extremely well. Markus Werba (Guglielmo) and Pietro Spagnoli (Don Alfonso) have sung and acted Così very often and in all the major theaters; thus, they did not need any stage direction to sing and act very well. It is interesting to see how Pietro Spagnoli changed role (from Guglielmo to Don Alfonso) as the years went by and his register lowered. The real surprise was the young tenor Paolo Fanale (Ferrando): he fully deserved the accolades and ovations he received by an enthusiastic audience after the aria 'Quell'Aura Amorosa', which he sang in a masterly way, going easily from mezza voce to legato and acute.

The women's group was good, but less impressive, also because their Italian diction was far from perfect. In a ranking, I would consider mezzo Angela Brower (Dorabella) as the best: she will sing the same role in July at the Salzburg Festival. Sabina Puértolas as Despina is quite promising. Corinne Winters (Fiordiligi) seems more at ease with heavier roles — she has sung many of Puccini's heroines and Mélisande: her 'Come Scoglio' almost sounded like an aria from Tosca.

From left to right, Paolo Fanale as Ferrante, Angela Brower as Dorabella, Corinne Winters as Fiordiligi, Markus Werba as Guglielmo and conductor Semyon Bychkov in Mozart's 'Così fan tutte' in Rome. Photo © 2016 Riccardo Musacchio & Flavio Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution

In any event, the audience loved the performance and warmly applauded conductor, singers and chorus. I had mixed feelings.