The subtitle for Mozart’s Così fan tutte may be ‘The School For Lovers’, but it’s as a school for directors that the opera is most instructive. From four lovers and two different romantic pairings, the composer spins a parable whose moral is as elusive as its morals. Faced with so much ambiguity (and so little political correctness) directors tend either to sand down the rough edges with laughs, or fling a capacious concept over the whole lot. It says something about the awkward profundity of this most inscrutable and affection-resistant of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations that it can take it. It says even more that you so rarely see an outstanding production.
While Christophe Honoré’s Così (seen this summer at both Aix and Edinburgh) ran headfirst at the opera’s misogyny, spicing its sexual manipulations with an unexpected racial dimension, Jan Philipp Gloger’s new production for the Royal Opera is interested much less in either sex or politics than in the seductions and illusions of opera itself.
His quartet of contemporary lovers make a late entrance to Act One, arriving through the auditorium clutching shiny red programmes and dressed for an evening in the stalls.
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