Così fan tutte review – talented cast deserves better

‘This is all about you!” shouted Jan Philipp Gloger’s staging of Così fan tutte at the audience in 2016, as the four central characters clambered on to the stage from the auditorium and were persuaded by wily Don Alfonso to enact the opera in a series of self-consciously theatrical settings. Now, with Julia Burbach directing its first revival, its message still comes over loud, if not exactly clear.

We move from a set resembling the Royal Opera’s own foyer on to a station platform, into a cocktail bar, behind the proscenium, under the stage to the dressing rooms, and all the way up the garden path to a green baize mound underneath an apple tree wrapped in a glittery green serpent. The loss of innocence is amply suggested; the acquisition of wisdom, not so much.

There are loads of ideas at play here, but none of the characters’ thought processes comes across with any sustained clarity – and conductor Stefano Montanari doesn’t linger on what Mozart’s music has to say, pushing the singers onwards relentlessly, and laying on the fortepiano accompaniment in the recitatives with a shovel.

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Thomas Allen, who practically owns the role of Don Alfonso at this address, grits his teeth and keeps on smiling. Salome Jicia makes lovely work of Fiordiligi’s two big arias; she is better served than Paolo Fanale as Ferrando, whose nearly gorgeous aria Un’ aura amorosa is a conspicuous exception to Montanari’s hard and fast rule, so halting as to be bent almost out of shape. Gyula Orendt’s clownish Guglielmo is a winning performance, as are Serena Malfi’s silver-toned Dorabella and Serena Gamberoni’s bright Despina. This cast deserves better.