Mozart magic

It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any obvious grave shortcomings in the first night’s performance of it at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but it annoyingly failed to achieve lift-off. Nerves may well have a lot to do with that: the playing of the Overture had enough problems of intonation among the winds, which later played beautifully, to suggest that. Business suits were the order of the day for the male cast, and of course cell-phones; a TV was on when the curtain rose, and the Stars and Stripes were prominent, though what light setting Figaro in the United States might cast on the opera — or for that matter on the United States — remained unclear.