There are productions of this opera in which the original lovers return to one another; some in which they switch; and lately, in our more cynical age, where we aren’t certain, but everyone has learned a lesson. And there are some in which it’s all a jolly romp, and laughter and tolerance win the day, and all hard feelings are set aside. This last is idiotic: after the emotional traumas these couples put one another through, it would require plenty of explanation and “healing time”, as it’s now known, to heal their scars. But the work is a veritable festival of irony and overstated feelings as well (both textually and musically) and it was never meant to be funereal. Caricature is offered alongside actual grief and it makes the work fascinatingly slippery. It’s very rare that a director and conductor get it right.
The Austrian film director Michael Haneke is not known for his joie de vivre: Amour, the movie for which he won an Oscar, concerns a man caring for his stroke-victim wife; in The White Ribbon, taking place in the years before World War I, he shows us the ritual abuse of children, prefiguring the horrors to come; Funny Games, which he made once in German and a few years later, in English, focuses on a family being tortured for laughs by insane intruders. It’s no surprise, therefore, that his Cosi, captured here from Madrid’s Tatro Real, is less than a romp, and he, his cast, and conductor Sylvain Cambreling, have sucked the joy out of every situation in the opera. You cannot deny its effectiveness, but you also get the feeling of seeing this work through a skewed lens.
The exquisite contemporary setting by Christoph Kantor—a huge living area with outside terrace and sky view, minimally furnished with couches, a fireplace, and stainless-steel refrigerator well-stocked with booze of all types—is made bolder and more fascinating by Moidele Bickels’ costumes, some of which are 18th century (Don Alfonso’s and some guests at a “cocktail party” in Act 1), most of which are contemporary, and one of which, Despina’s, is a commedia dell’arte, flimsy cream-colored dress.
It’s a stumper as to what this may mean: Has the Mefistofelian Alfonso invited an audience to watch his experiment destroy his friends? He is married to Despina in this production, incidentally, and they seem to despise one another: more than once they slap each other’s faces. Is their behavior a warning to the two couples? If so, it doesn’t help. Neither does the fact that everyone, save for Alfonso and Despina, gets drunker and drunker as the evening (opera) goes on.
Add to this the incredibly slow tempos and ungodly pauses that have been designated for the recitatives, which have the effect of examining every word out of the lovers’ mouths, and there’s something torturous about this whole affair. Ferrando sings “Un aura amorosa”, an aria about how love nourishes the heart, crumpled in a ball, nearly weeping. And that’s before things turn sour. It is too interesting to be dismissed, but be warned: This is a bleak affair and may just be a complete misreading. The fact that it makes its desired effect does not make it “right”.
The cast is not starry, but they are just what director and conductor apparently want. Lithe, good-looking, self-pitying, they are occasionally laid low by Cambreling’s slow tempos (for the arias as well as the recits). Anett Frisch’s slinky-in-a-red-dress Fiordiligi is willfully sung and acted and you long to encounter her in a production that does not tear her apart; the voice is solid and appealing. Paola Gardina’s Dorabella, in black pants suit and boyish haircut, is less flighty than usual but sings with a fine, medium-sized mezzo and true pitch. Juan Francisco Gatell’s Ferrando is not one for the ages, but it would be hard to fault him either, and Andreas Wolf’s Guglielmo’s transition from swagger to distress is very telling.
The Don Alfonso, William Shimell, who acts in Haneke’s Amour, is a marvelous mastermind, albeit with a voice that does not please the ear: he resorts to a type of Sprechstimme every so often. And if it were possible to be a vicious soubrette, that is how I’d describe Kerstin Averno’s Despina. Thoroughly unsatisfied and endlessly complaining, she’s enough to turn one off chocolate. The Madrid forces play stunningly for Cambreling. This intellectual, sour Cosi is not for everyone, and certainly not for anyone who prefers the true double-sided coin and warm yet stern creation of Da Ponte and Mozart. A marvelously balanced reading on DVD remains the Glyndebourne show on Opus Arte led by Ivan Fischer, with Muti’s from Vienna (EuroArts) a close second.
Picture and sound are superb; subtitles in major European languages and Dutch and Korean.
