La Grotta di Trofonio, St John's Smith Square, review: 'playful'

This delightful evening incidentally offered a salutary reminder that Mozart didn’t have quite the originality that is ordinarily attributed to him: other composers in Vienna were also ploughing his furrow, albeit without the force of his genius.

La Grotta di Trofonio is a comic opera by Antonio Salieri – a name blackened by legend and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, falsely representing him as Mozart’s envious nemesis. The evidence actually suggests that their relations were largely cordial, and governed by professional emulation rather than personal jealousy.

And in this case, it is Mozart who seems to have learnt from Salieri: first performed in 1785, the latter’s La Grotta di Trofonio, ‘Trofonio’s Cave’, was a big hit of a sort that Mozart always craved, and although its influence on Così fan tutte (1789) may be undocumented, it is palpable to the point of plagiarism.

The story is silly. Two sisters, one fun-loving and one bluestocking serious, are happily matched to two youths of similarly contrasting temperaments. But when the latter visit a magic cave inhabited by a wizard, they undergo personality transformations which leaves the young ladies aghast.

The farce develops without depth or complexity, but as well as pre-figuring Così’s plot, it heralds some of its musical elements too – notably its long and vivacious finales, a trio in the manner of ‘Soave sia il vento’ and a tenor aria which sounds strikingly like ‘Un’ aura amorosa’.  

The pace is swift and the mood playful, enlivened by instrumentation rich in woodwind. Salieri may lack Mozart’s mastery of harmony or his ability to enrich emotion and pull at the heartstrings, but he shares his language and adherence to conventions. The result is charming.

Bampton Classical Opera brought their open-air summer production of this piece (never previously performed in Britain) to St John’s Smith Square and gave an enthusiastic audience much pleasure. Wittily translated into English, it was given a light-touch staging by Jeremy Gray that pitched camp somewhere between Jane Austen and P G Wodehouse territory, with the magic cave represented as Dr Who’s Tardis phone box. 

Paul Wingfield conducted the chamber orchestra Chroma with panache, and a young cast was fresh and vigorous throughout, even though one of its members, Anna Starushkevych had fallen foul of visa problems in the Ukraine and been replaced at very short notice by an off-stage singer Catherine Backhouse and on-stage actor Marieke Bernard-Berkel – both of them excellent.