Few at home know about the Garsington Opera, an outdoor company that sounds like an idyll. Situated outside Oxford, their productions are tailored to balmy evenings in a c garden attached to a Jacobean manor.  One imagines white lawn dresses draped on willowy ladies redolent of heliotrope. (On second thought, idyllic doesn’t begin to describe it.) Or is this an abreaction, a word invented  by Freud for an episode of strong emotional release or catharsis? I needed a release after attending the Garsington’s Cosi fan tutte, which moved indoors to the unbalmy clime of the Barbican in north London. Mozart in a concrete bunker more or less defines cognitive dissonance, but we’ll let that be.

What I reacted to, as many have in the past, was Da Ponte’s discomfiting libretto, which Mozart tries to cancel out much of the time. The plot is geometrically neat: two pairs of lovers have sworn endless devotion until the males test the females by disguising themselves as exotic Albanian soldiers with flamboyant mustachios. Their blandishments succeed in leading the other man’s fiancée down the slippery path of betrayal, but in the end all is mended, and the lovers are the wiser for being tested. Da Ponte has two points to make over a three-hour span, one cynical, the other rancid. The cynical point is that all women will betray their men if given half a chance (Cosi fan tutte freely translates as  ‘Women are all alike’). The rancid point is that men will drink bitter dregs if they try to test a woman’s loyalty. These nuggets are dolled up in what passes for wit and games of dalliance. 

Strangely, rather than taking their cue from Mozart’s humane music, as full of forgiveness as it is of melody,  modern stage directors sniff at the underbelly of Da Ponte’s libretto, giving us lovers who are spoiled, petulant, narcissistic, and cruel –these inhabit the nice productions.  On the farther fringes of distaste, the girls are sluts and the boys are randy.  The Garsington production was blessedly mild. Updated to England in WW I, the sight of well-born Tommys in khaki and nurses in Red Cross caps vaguely  approximated Da Ponte’s young with-its, whose foolishness in love here seemed innocent rather than minatory. 

The singing cast were all fine, excepting a bleating tenor as Ferrando. Knowing that he couldn’t jump any musical hurdles, he didn’t take a run at them.  The two sisters who are the romantic pivot of the story can be so-so actresses (as these were), but they must have excellent and well-matched voices.  Devotees of Cosi await two litmus tests: the opening duet, “Guarda, sorella,” and Fiordiligi’s murderously difficult early aria, “Come scoglio,” which causes trembling fits among the world’s most gifted lyric sopranos (it left Elisabeth Schwarzkopf standing proudly but frayed). Erica Eloff, a tall, slender South African singer – a coloratura, actually, but with ample volume – couldn’t help being cautious in the rougher surf of the aria, but she did well by any measure. She was a standout musically, given a lustrous, even voice that never shrieked or turned thin on top. The Dorabella,  Anna Slephany, a London-trained mezzo, had a soft-grained, creamy tone that blended beautifully with her sister.  Cosi is rich in  duets, trios, and ensembles – one of the reasons no single character, alas, remains etched in memory – and to give these young singers credit, all of them melded in honeyed togetherness. 

But the night belonged to the conductor, Steuart Bedford, and his small period orchestra. Since this Cosi was semi-staged, the musicians sat on stage backing up the singers. Thus we heard every note of the score, a bubbling chocolate fountain – the flavor came to mind because Mozart excludes the higher, sharper tone of trumpet, oboe, and flute. I said before that Mozart’s music often cancels out Da Ponte, by which I meant that the score is one long serenade.  In tone and tune we are in the world of Mozart’s great wind serenades, and much of the action onstage could be imagined at night, since it concerns wooing, rendezvous, seduction, and ultimately lovemaking in the offing.  Lovers’ plights are  bathed in moonlight and healed (it happens in life often enough). Bedford, an acolyte of Benjamin Britten and one of England’s best unsung conductors, understood everything I felt – he made me feel it – and  produced a supple, rounded sound from his period musicians (no zingy strings and vinegary winds).  By the end the sting of Da Ponte could be cured with a salve while the blessing of Mozart entered the heart and stayed there.

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To read about the 2007 Tanglewood Music Center performance under James Levine, click here.