COSÌ FAN
TUTTE Opera North, The Lowry
OPERA NORTH
are offering two of their vintage productions at The Lowry this week, with one
new production (Giordano’s Andrea Chenier) which doesn’t come until Saturday.
Their Così
Fan Tutte is 12 years old (last seen here six-and-a-half years ago), and still
excellent value. Director Tim Albery sets it in its own period, with 18th-century
wigs and costumes, and in an anonymous place with no backdrop. But one set
dominates all – a huge camera obscura in which all truth is to be revealed by
an unblinking lens (set and costume design by Tobias Hoheisel).
The story –
of two sisters and their lovers, who discover all too easily that affections
can be first simulated and then transferred to each other’s sweethearts (in a
single day, thus winning a bet for philosopher Don Alfonso, aided and abetted
by the amoral ladies’ maid, Despina) – is thus presented as a kind of early
scientific experiment, with chosen materials and a controlled environment.
It works
really well. Sung in English, the opera must depend on audibility to make its
full effect, and, oddly enough, is less easy to understand than in the format
we’re more used to these days, of original language with projected English
surtitles.
William
Dazeley (Don Alfonso) is well used to opera in English and has no trouble in
that department, delivering the role with the practised expertise and burnished
tone we’ve seen and heard before. And he’s funny.
The young
couples (Máire Flavin as Fiordiligi, Gavan Ring as Guglielmo, Helen Sherman as
Dorabella, Nicholas Watts as Ferrando) are all top-drawer young opera singers,
and well known to Opera North audiences. Máire Flavin was thoroughly tested and
came through with flying colours in her two showpieces, Like A Fortress (Come
Scoglio) and Dearest Lover (Per Pietà), and Nicholas Watts shone in Our Love Is
A Flower (Un’ Aura Amoroso) and elsewhere.
Ellie
Laugharne (Despina) is likewise a lively actress-singer whom we know well from
Buxton Festival and Opera North previously: she communicated more by face and
demeanour than total clarity but is always a joy to see and hear.
Anthony
Kraus in the pit, with the Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North, kept all lively
and precise – only the final scene made a little less than its full impact, and
that’s mainly down to the audibility issue when everything’s in English.
Repeated
March 18.
****
Robert
Beale
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