Così fan Tutte review – impressive ensemble cast focus on the wider questions

Jan Philipp Gloger’s production of Mozart’s comedy apparently starts not at the beginning of the show, but at the end: during the overture we witness the curtain call of a traditional, period-costume staging, which is almost painfully well observed.

More importantly, it leads the four young lovers in the real production’s cast – who commence the evening as members of the Covent Garden audience – into the world of theatrical fantasy that the staging itself self-consciously inhabits. Few dramatic plots, after all, are as deliberately artificial as that of Così, which depends on a deception it would be impossible to sustain for a second in real life. Where else could such a thing happen, except in the theatre?

Gloger and designer Ben Baur follow this gesture by locating the opera in a long series of deliberately stagey sets – a theatrical foyer, a railway station, a cocktail bar, the Garden of Eden, a backstage area – where the young lovers are put through their trials and tribulations by Johannes Martin Kränzle’s precise Don Alfonso, aided and abetted by Sabina Puértolas’s personality-girl Despina. Rather than focusing on the dubious notion of supposed female fallibility, Gloger seems to be addressing wider questions about the honesty and reality of all human emotions.

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Così is nothing if not an ensemble piece, and this cast is unusually well-matched vocally. Even so, there are standouts in the shape of Daniel Behle’s volatile Ferrando, most of all in his aria Un’ Aura Amorosa, and in the sheer spirit with which Corinne Winters’s by that point almost suicidally troubled Fiordiligi attacks every note of Per Pietà.

The puppyish energy of Alessio Arduini’s Guglielmo and the street-smart ebullience of Angela Brower’s Dorabella prove no less endearing. Individually impressive, the cast form an expert musical and dramatic team, playing off one another and responding to Gloger’s complex theatrical demands with unstinting commitment.

Conductor Semyon Bychkov’s previous heavyweight assignments at this venue – Wagner, Strauss, Tchaikovsky – notwithstanding, he succeeds in maintaining lucid orchestral textures and achieves a finely judged balance between stage and pit.