La Finta Giardiniera, review: 'feeble plot, stylish staging'

Mozart’s operas have always been so closely associated with Glyndebourne that’s it’s a jolt to realise that this production of La Finta Giardiniera represents the first time it has ever ventured into his teenage oeuvre. The first time and, I hope, the last.

Written to an anonymous libretto when the composer was 18, it mixes comedy, romantic intrigue and darker drama in a manner that Mozart would handle more sure-footedly in his mature collaboration with da Ponte.

The plot is feeble and convoluted in the Louis Quinze manner. Its nub is that Sandrina (the titular “girl pretending to be a gardener”) is an aristocrat fleeing from her abusive lover Belfiore: both go mad and finally come to their senses. Reams of fluent and conventional arias of merely journeyman quality flesh this out, lit up by passages during which one senses the hand of someone with bigger ambitions and his own ideas - flashes of pure genius, especially in the ensembles, pre-echo Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro.

This wasn’t enough, however, to sustain my attention for the duration of three sizeable acts, and despite some drastic cutting and shaping in the interests of modern coherence, I found it impossible to feel any emotional involvement in what amounts to an elegant masquerade.

Glyndebourne has lavished considerable resources on this second-rate material. Robin Ticciati conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with an impeccably light yet crisp touch, and the director Frederic Wake-Walker has devised a thoughtfully stylish staging, elegantly set by designer Antony McDonald in a rococo salon (a friend remarked that it could have doubled up nicely for Act 1 of Der Rosenkavalier).

Much is made of the idea of disguise, artifice and illusion being stripped away - of the tension between the formal and the natural - as Wake-Walker labours to present the characters legibly and plausibly, abetted by a talented cast.

Christiane Karg’s diamantine purity of tone and impeccable technique put her at the forefront of lyric sopranos, and her portrayal of the wronged Sandrina is sharply complemented by Joel Prieto’s properly effete and drippy Belfiore. Joélle Harvey, Rachel Frenkel and Nicole Heaston seize their chances in secondary roles, but the show was almost stolen by the terrific bravado of Gavan Ring, who at short notice sang the bluff servant Nardo from the wings while a virus-stricken Gyula Orendt acted it on stage.

Until 21 August. Tickets: 01273 813813, www.glyndebourne.com