UK Edition
Review
Delicious comic timing sweeps this frothy Figaro along - review
Four years on, the revival of Michael Grandage’s 2012 production of The Marriage of Figaro has come up fresh as a daisy. However, it must be said that if you relish the spiky social tensions of Mozart’s opera, this production may not be for you. The opera has been relocated to Spain in the Seventies, as Barbarina’s hippie-ish headscarf and platform shoes and the Count’s snazzy red sports-car makes clear.
The Count’s villa is a Moorish-style pleasure palace, with richly detailed tile-work in the Countess’s bedroom, and (as the revolving stage reveals) lots of shady nooks in the veranda at the back, apt for night-time assignations.
The Count seems to be stoned most of the time and is easily duped. Baritone Gyula Orendt plays him with amusingly fatuous vanity, but he’s a paper-thin character, and Orendt struggles to bring conviction to his rages at discovering his wife’s apparent infidelity.
In general, the opportunities to explore real feeling in this tale of a “mad day” are passed up. South African soprano Golda Schultz, as Countess Almaviva, has an exquisitely beautiful voice, but she comes over as flighty and as thoughtless as her husband.
Only in Figaro’s despairing rage against the unfaithfulness of women – flung out with sudden blazing heat by Davide Luciano – does one feel the deeper waters of the opera being stirred. But one hardly misses the depths, as the shallows of the intrigues and sudden compromising revelations are played with such delicious comic timing, swept along by Jonathan Cohen’s brisk but flexible conducting.
Carlo Lepore is the definition of the Italian buffo bass in his portrayal of the scheming, sweaty lawyer Bartolo.
Natalia Kawalek plays Cherubino as a dizzy Seventies babe, so hormonal she can’t sit still for five seconds at a stretch. Most winning of all is young Italian soprano Rosa Feola as Figaro’s wife Susanna. She runs rings around the men, laying traps into which they obediently walk, all the while singing in a pert, crystal-clear soprano. She’s clearly a star in the making.
Until August 24. Tickets: 01273 815000; glyndebourne.com