This year’s Grange festival opens with a new production of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, conducted by Kirill Karabits and directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans. It’s a striking piece of theatre, at once traditional and probing: traditional because Lloyd-Evans and his designer Dick Bird keep the original 18th-century Neapolitan setting; probing because Lloyd-Evans carefully and insightfully prises open the opera’s emotional complexities, gradually exposing the moral and sexual hypocrisies at its centre.
The production’s stance is established during the overture, when we see Guglielmo (Nicholas Lester) buy a locket for Fiordiligi (Samantha Clarke) from a vendor in a teeming Neapolitan street, then creep back to visit a brothel, from which he eventually emerges with Alessandro Fisher’s Ferrando and Christian Senn’s Alfonso, the three of them slightly the worse for wear. It soon becomes glaringly apparent that, in testing Fiordiligi’s fidelity, Guglielmo also intends to spend the winnings from his wager on prostitutes.
This is a staging in which male sexual attitudes and behaviour are held up to withering scrutiny, while the women retain the balance of sympathies. The first act finale plays itself out not in a garden, but in the bedroom that Clarke’s Fiordiligi shares with Kitty Whately’s Dorabella after the men have almost brutally invaded their private space. Whately’s yielding to Lester’s Guglielmo has a self-assured frankness that echoes Mozart’s genuine eroticism at this point, while Fisher’s seduction of Clarke is altogether more troubling, subjecting her to deep psychological and moral anguish. Occasionally the tone falters in the second half, where Alfonso’s drafting in of the brothel’s louche denizens to sing the serenade strikes a slightly awkward note. The ending is rightly disconcerting, however. The last thing we see is Carolina Lippo’s furious Despina kicking Alfonso in the crotch. By then, you really feel he deserves it.
Musically, much of it is superb. Clarke, with her silvery tone, is ravishing in her arias and her voice blends wonderfully well with Whately’s in their duets. The latter brings real emotional fire to È Amore un Ladroncello and that duet with Lester. He sounds gritty on occasion, but his Guglielmo is a finely judged portrait of a man thrown off balance by the consequences of his behaviour. Fisher, immaculately stylish, gives us a breathtaking Un’Aura Amorosa and an angrily disconsolate Tradito, Schernito. Lippo can occasionally be shrill, but makes a knowing, assertive Despina, while Senn is an outstanding Alfonso, a wicked glint in his eyes and voice. In the pit, meanwhile, Karabits is tremendous, immaculate in his judgment of pace and dramatic momentum, marvellously alert to every shift in mood: this is the best conducted Così I’ve heard in ages, and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra play wonderfully for him.
