[Editor’s Note: This production, with Canadian Gerald Finley as Don Alfonso, will be shown in cinemas across Canada (and around the world) as part of the Met’s Live in HD season on Saturday, October 3rd.]
No doubt about it: The Metropolitan Opera’s Così fan tutte is a wonderfully watchable show. Phelim McDermott’s production – first seen at the Met in 2018, but originally staged for English National Opera four years earlier, and now revived by Sara Erde – offers a riot of colourful invention in its reimagining of librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s eighteenth-century Naples as a mid-1950s Coney Island-style motel and amusement park. Set designer Tom Pye’s ever-in-motion series of panels and doors and sundry carnival attractions delight the eye, as do the period-perfect costumes by Laura Hopkins, fetchingly worn by the singers and by the twelve variedly skilled members of the non-singing Skills Ensemble: bearded lady, sword swallower, snake charmer and their ilk. Everything works with often exhilarating precision.
Somehow, though, Mozart’s Così gets lost in the visually seductive shuffle, playing distinctly second fiddle to the stage business throughout. Take the overture: with the charismatically ebullient Gerald Finley (Don Alfonso) as ringmaster and the drolly poker-faced Ana María Martínez (Despina) as his sidekick, the members of the Skills Ensemble emerge one by one from a trunk, each prompting applause from the audience, as does every change of the verbal placards that form wry commentaries on the opera’s plot. Mozart’s music is barely noticeable amid the ovations.
“I’m like a rock standing firm against the winds and the storm,” sings Fiordiligi in her famous first act showpiece, and I guess it’s textually not inapproriate that McDermott batters her with a perpetuum mobile of a staging as she negotiates its considerable vocal challenges, but again, the music seems almost incidental. Così is Mozart’s most intimate opera, but in scene after scene, the intimacy is compromised by the plethora of superfluous bodies onstage. The singers are often hard to spot amid the overcrowding, their own considerable skills rendered subservient to the Skills’ regular upstaging.
Photo Credit: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
Samantha Hankey as Dorabella with the Guglielmo of Andrey Zhilikhovsky journey through the carnival’s Tunnel of Love
Which is a shame, because the musical performance, when I could focus on it, seemed a very good one. The two sisters were in the lively, mellifluous hands of Samantha Hankey (Dorabella), whose international career has burgeoned happily since her Juilliard School days of not so very long ago, and Federica Lombardi, somewhat surprisingly only the second native Italian Fiordiligi in the Met’s 104 years of presenting Così. The pair excelled in duet and larger ensemble, though their first delectable appearance was compromised by the Met’s noisy and intrusive seating of latecomers – shame on whoever sanctioned this change of longtime policy. Lombardi, a singer I’ve very much admired in a variety or roles, fell short of the ideal in her two arias, where her lack of a substantial chest voice compromised the vocal line, but she surely wasn’t helped by the first being sung amid a superabundance of stage business and the second while traveling to and fro aloft in a (simulated) hot-air balloon.
Tenor Duke Kim, a winner of the Met’s Laffont Competition in 2021, was a good, genial Ferrando, though his timbre is a little too pointedly nasal for my taste. Ben Bliss, who sang both this production’s premiere and its 2020 revival, remains an unbettered ideal. Martínez (reminding me of Ann B. Davis of TV’s beloved The Brady Bunch) was a joy to watch even when her tart tones and over-the-top vocal impersonations of doctor and notary weren’t as joyful to hear. Israeli conductor Nimrod David Pfeffer, from what the staging allowed me to hear uncompromised, led a fine, propulsive performance (was it he who encouraged the few, but generally effective, embellishments?).
But it was the two baritones who shone brightest. Andrey Zhilikhovsky, the Met’s brilliant Rossini Figaro two seasons ago, proved an ideal Guglielmo, whose vibrant stage presence made him the sole member of the lovers’ quartet to consistently defeat the staging’s intrusions. And Finley, the terrific Alfonso of the 2020 revival, was even better this time around. At 66 years old, he’s still singing beautifully, and his stage savvy has only increased over the years. Whether you were watching McDermott’s Così or listening to Mozart’s, he delivered the whole bag of goods.
Photo Credit: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
"Whether you were watching McDermott’s Così or listening to Mozart’s, Gerald Finley delivered the whole bag of goods."
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