Music Chronicle I

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Clark, Robert S

The SummerScape production was admirably suited to the opera's surreal zaniness. The set designer, the architect Rafael Vinoly, fashioned a series of moving panels and raked floors that accentuated the constantly shifting scenes and encounters. Francesca Zambello, the director, moved her sometimes space-challenged charges skillfully, eliciting overall an antic tone that brought a kind of unity to the often frenzied goings-on. In this ensemble piece there were no marquee roles, but a few of the players impressed-Igor Tarassov as the protagonist Kovalyov, Alexandre Podbolotov as his valet, Leonid Bomstein as the nose, and Sheila Nadler as a matron-and as a team they worked well together. Leon Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra, providing a vivid kaleidoscopic backdrop for the action. Supertitles by the estimable Cori Ellison did little to clarify the more densely populated scenes.

It is hard to believe that there was ever a time that New York summers did not have a Mostly Mozart Festival. Given its initial impetus, cynics like to say, by the air conditioning of Lincoln Center's concert halls and theaters, the festival, now past its thirty-eighth year, has artfully managed the stages of its growth, moving from programming that literally interpreted its name to a broader reach that included the classical masters of pre- and post-Mozart: Bach, Haydn, Handel, Schubert, and Beethoven. Accompanying these changes has been an influx of period instrument ensembles to present the expanded early-music and baroque programming. This past summer saw another innovation, the first fully staged presentation of an opera-and fittingly Mozart's Cost fan tutte. The performances in the La Guardia Theater, just across the street from the Lincoln Center campus, were directed by Jonathan Miller.

In a pre-concert talk with Robert Marx, Dr. Miller explained his approach to Cosi fan tutte. His career as a director has included five Mozart productions, he said, and four of them had been traditional, because he did not presume to separate the likes of Figaro and Don Giovanni from the specific circumstances that gave them life. But "Cosi doesn't take place anywhere." Despite the libretto's perfunctory references to Ferrara and Albania, the opera's environment is neutral, almost abstract, and thus easily transportable in space and time. So Miller and his designer cohorts relocated the action to an undefined present. Costumes suggested today's casual wear; when the two swains agreed to Don Alfonso's plan to deceive the sisters, they reappeared disguised as sixties hippies. Some touches reflected current mores: when the two men went off to war, leaving their fiancées, a reporter and a cameraman showed up to record the ladies' distress. Though the letter of the original was abandoned, the spirit was never violated.

Miller's direction was intelligent and unobtrusive. He described traditional operatic practice as "shrouded in layers of supposition about what people do" in certain circumstances, and his method as "reminding people of what they knew all along." The result was a naturalness that is rarely encountered in the opera house. The unitary set consisted only of a brightly lit room where the sisters resided, furnished with a table and a few chairs, a pallet, and a floor-standing mirror. The players moved about freely, but during solos and other sung passages were for the most part stationary, enabling the singers to make their points musically, without distractions. Sight gags were mercifully few and apt. Some gestures were striking: for example, at the close of the initial cabalelta section of Fiordiligi's aria "Come scoglio," in which she declares her determination to remain steadfast to her fiancé, she left the stage, only to return abruptly at the repeat, startling the others who had relaxed in her absence. There were also subtleties that enlivened the action without detracting from the music.