Classical Music

All opera needs to be seen as well as heard, and both the convivial little Austrian and the libertine Italian adventurer (a sort of minor-league Casanova who ended up as the first professor of Italian in New York – you somehow don’t expect the librettist of ‘Figaro’ and the Big Apple to inhabit the same world) were instinctive stage animals; their big three are resilient enough to take any amount of updating, conceptualising and general mauling – and bounce back. Feature continues

The release that promised most is the most disappointing. Virgin Classics have brought out ‘Così fan tutte’ from last year’s Aix-en-Provence festival. The in-built anti-climax one feels at this second-rank tourist trap which rips off the gullible traveller with the worst restaurant food in France always spills over into performances in the unattractively-tiered seating courtyard of the bishop’s palace (no, it’s not a lovely baroque court, just a yard). Young British lion Daniel Harding conducts and Patrice Chéreau directs – or rather doesn’t. Set on a bare modern stage complete with ladders, fuse-box, phone and crates, but oddly costumed in period, this directionless maundering shows no overall idea about the bittersweet paradoxes of a dark comedy of emotional self-discovery that clothes artificial plotting with heart-rending music. Clueless camerawork ducks and weaves, the film director apparently as baffled as we are at the cast’s messy, unmotivated wanderings. Veterans Ruggero Raimondi (Losey’s Don Giovanni, here touchingly elderly) and occasionally breathless Barbara Bonney show stage mastery. The standout performance comes from Elina Garanca’s Dorabella, a creamy-voiced and beautiful-looking mezzo – whose Virgin CD of Mozart concert and opera arias (0946 332631) is highly recommended.

Against the odds, what looks like a gimmicky ‘Figaro’ on Opus Arte packs the requisite fun, sexiness and heartwarming humanity. Set in a chic modern fashion-house owned by the Count and Countess, it boasts a puzzling extra character with a mobile keyboard who obligingly fills in besides providing props (a little bottle for the stressed Countess to swig from). Sneakers, granny specs and jeans make Christine Schäfer’s Cherubino the most boyish-looking ever; Lorenzo Regazzo is a good trad Figaro, Christiane Oelze a Countess on heat, desperately giving her indifferent husband the come-on.The pivotal relationship, lecherous employer and quick-witted maidservant, is vividly depicted – and it doesn’t hurt that Peter Mattei’s handsome Count bears a fleeting resemblance in profile to Trevor Eve, while Heidi Grant Murphy’s very together Susanna recalls Caroline Quentin. Tics and twitches apart, full markes for the sheer vitality and theatrical sense of Christoph Marthaler’s production for the Paris Opéra. Sylvain Cambreling’s conducting, some un-Mozartian rallentandi excepted, lovingly guides the sex and class warfare of this ‘folle journée’.

Also on Opus Arte, two Don Giovannis seduce, cajole, bully and are dragged down to hell, both needless to say in modern dress. Lluis Pasqual’s Teatro Real Madrid production evokes a Franco-era society, menace never far beneath the surface. Stylish and compelling, it fields a domineering Don in Carlos Álvarez, Regazzo again (as comic servant Leporello) and a warm-blooded Elvira from Sonia Ganassi. The other ‘Don Giovanni’ is Calixto Bieito’s notorious lager-lout, Ibiza-culture, drugs and sex production that so outraged London critics (so they said) at ENO. Filmed on Bieito’s home stage of Barcelona, it boasts some fine singing from Véronique Gens’ Elvira (once a problematic role, now every lyric soprano’s favourite). If you go for coke-snorting, blow-jobbing sadistic violence it makes sense.