Le Nozze di Figaro – review

The final instalment of the Royal Opera's Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy is a revival by Leah Hausman of David McVicar's 2006 production of Le Nozze di Figaro. This, in many respects, is the finest staging of the three, though anyone already familiar with it will notice that, under Hausman's direction, there has been a significant change in tone. A hardness of edge has replaced its former warmth. Things have become angrier. The cast slam doors and kick furniture about. The resulting sense of emotional stridency brings with it, for some, the temptation to exaggerate. Both Aleksandra Kurzak's Susanna and Ann Murray's Marcellina are in danger of going over the top at times.

The shift in mood does, however, focus our attention securely on the conflicts at the work's centre. The evening belongs to Lucas Meachem's Count and Rachel Willis-Sørensen's Countess – superb artists, whose depiction of the couple's marital hell is both detailed and troubling. Meachem is elegant yet burly: we gradually become aware that the snideness creeping into his wonderfully sensual voice heralds terrible violence. Willis-Sørensen is poised, majestic and desperate, making much of the crucial line, sometimes thrown away, about being "forced to seek help from servants".

Meachem's formidable antagonist, meanwhile, is Ildebrando D'Arcangelo's Figaro, subtly characterised by a man whose growing social awareness is at times undercut by his own cocksure arrogance. I confess to preferring Kurzak's gleaming tone in the bel canto repertoire nowadays rather than in Mozart, though her singing is admirable and she's particularly fine in her scenes with Anna Bonitatibus's nerdy Cherubino. Antonio Pappano, meanwhile, conducts with the mixture of toughness and grace that characterises this fine evening as a whole.