Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✩✩
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Atom Egoyan
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
January 18, 24, 29, February 1, 6, 9, 15, 18 & 21, 2014
“Get Out the Butterfly Nets”
Filmmaker Atom Egoyan found great acclaim for his productions of Salome (1996) revived in 2013 and Die Walküre (2004) for the Canadian Opera Company. His third COC production, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, is not so successful. His first problem is in trying to combine two disparate sources of imagery. His second is in losing control of both of them. Although he claims in his “Director’s Notes” to have a new take on the opera’s plot, luckily there is no evidence of this in his direction and he tells the story of Mozart’s libretto in a straightforward manner with a keen understanding of the characters’ psychology. Despite the confusing imagery, the most salient feature of this new Così is that it is beautifully sung by a vibrant young cast.
Così is one of Mozart’s most difficult operas for a modern audience because Lorenzo da Ponte’s overtly misogynist libretto inspired Mozart to one of his most beautiful scores. The title literally means “Thus do all women” but in the context of the opera the phrase means “All women are alike in their inability to be faithful”. This is the view that the cynical Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen) wants to prove to his friends Ferrando (Paul Appleby) and Guglielmo (Robert Gleadow) about their fiancées, the sisters Dorabella (Wallis Giunta) and Fiordiligi (Layla Claire). The two young men cannot believe that their fiancées would ever stray, but Don Alfonso makes a wager that if the two men do as he says they will see that their beloveds can not remain faithful for even one day in their absence. The fact that the sisters’ maid Despina (Tracy Dahl) believes firmly that fidelity to one man is foolish only reinforces the opera’s unpleasant theme.
Alfonso’s plan is to put out that the two men have to leave suddenly because they have been drafted into the army. In fact, they return disguised as Albanian friends of Alfonso and immediately woo each other’s fiancée to see if she will give in. As a modern audience we wish that one of the two could manage to hold out. But no, both ultimately succumb to the men’s advances. We also wish that someone would highlight the double standard of the time that holds women to a standard of purity and fidelity from which men are exempt, but that never happens.
It is up to the stage director to decide how to make the story more palatable, such as allowing the two women to see through men’s disguises. In his “Director’s Notes” Egoyan claims that in his version “The sisters seem to be in on Don Alfonso’s experiment from the beginning”. Fortunately, for us, he never does any such thing, or if he thinks he has, it is never apparent.
His prime source of inspiration is the subtitle for the opera “La scuola degli amanti” (“The School for Lovers”) that he decides to take literally. Therefore, Egoyan presents Alfonso as a teacher at a school, apparently specializing in biology, and his wager with the two young men is an experiment in biological determinism that the chorus as students will observe. There is nothing wrong with this approach. Debra Hanson’s set with its huge cabinet of curiosities in the back and blow-ups of pinned butterflies on each side, keeps the notion of the plot as an experiment always before us. One assumes she has updated the setting to the 1960s to make the sisters vows of faithfulness seem even more old-fashioned.
What doesn’t make sense is to have the two sisters, who from their uniforms are also students in the school, sleeping on the floor of the lab during the first part of the first scene. Why should they be there and why are they allowed to sleep in class? In Act 1 Egoyan has the chorus, clipboards in hand, closely follow and observe the lovers’ actions. In Act 2, however, he only sporadically recalls this theme. For the key points that the students should be observing – how the women eventually give in to the men – they are absent, which rather undermines the whole concept.
A second aspect of the school imagery, that of butterflies pinned or free, is one that Hanson takes to nonsensical extremes. Egoyan says, “While butterflies – the very symbol of freedom – can be caught and pinned down, such is not the case with the human heart”. This imagery might work if it were used consistently but it is not. For the outdoor scene in Act 1, Hanson has the sisters wear boaters with little butterflies attached as if flitting about. At the same time she has huge blow-ups of pinned butterflies flown above them. When the sisters first consider giving up their vow of faithfulness, Hanson has unpinned butterflies, illuminated from within, flown down as a backdrop. This time the backdrop accords with the action. Near the end, however, she has devised wedding gowns for the sisters with such a cloud of unpinned butterflies circling each headdress the two women look ridiculous. How is pinning yourself down for life related to the butterflies? At the end when the two couples decide, again, to marry, Hanson lowers the huge pinned butterflies again. By this time we’ve given up trying to understand the imagery.
Egoyan’s second source of imagery has nothing to do with the “school for lovers idea’. It is instead the painting “Las dos Fridas” (1939) by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54). The work forms the act drop that we see when we enter the auditorium. The painting is a double portrait of Kahlo, the likeness on the left wearing European clothes, the one on the right wearing traditional Mexican costume. The hearts of both are exposed, the one of the European Frida has been sliced open while that of the Mexican Frida is whole. A blood vessel runs from a locket of Frida’s ex-husband Diego Rivera that the Mexican Frida is holding and entwines the two until it ends in the lap of the European Frida where it is clamped off with a hemostat.
Such an error would not be important except that Egoyan and Hanson make the scissors a major symbol in their staging. Don Alfonso enters holding a huge pair of scissors. Hanson flies down a placard of scissors cutting a red cord or ribbon that lands on Ferrando. Fiordiligi beheads flowers with the scissors. In the painting the European Frida is clamping off the blood flowing from her ex-lover to herself. Egoyan could have made the idea of a hemostat work since the sisters have to clamp off the influence of their fiancés to fall for their new lovers, but scissors, at least with Kahlo’s painting looming before us, make no sense.
If the two hearts of “Las dos Fridas” were not enough, Hanson has two sacred hearts on pedestals brought out in Act 2 to stand on either side of the screen where Egoyan conducts his close-up survey of Kahlo’s painting. Since Così has less to do with the supernatural or the divine than any of Mozart’s operas, the presence of these sacred hearts, lit from within, flames bursting from the top, simply adds further confusion to the imagery. Having the two men enter as “Albanians” with their disguises painted on their fencing masks and singing so that we can’t see their faces at this important moment is another mistake.
As a director of opera, Egoyan does not show the assurance he did in Salome or Die Walküre. He falls into the trap of so many directors of comic operas by adding onstage motion when none is needed. The Act 1 trio “Soave sia il vento” is so gorgeous it’s a shame Egoyan thinks he has to make it funny by adding a parade of women wearing aqua blue wigs topped by sailing ships in diminishing sizes. Since the new setting is not the 18th century, why is Hanson making fun of the famous “la belle poule” wig, an extreme 18th-century style only in fashion for a few weeks? Since the five women do not exit in accordance with the size of their ships, what was the point of the scene at all?
Egoyan also distracts us during both of Fiordiligi’s central arias. In the second, “Per pietà, ben mio, perdona”, he begins his filmic traversal of Kahlo painting as if it somehow enlightened us about the aria when all we are really interested in is the movement of Layla Claire’s voice, not his camera.
It is good finally to see the great baritone Sir Thomas Allen at last with the COC even if he is now 69. He sings with what is primarily a character voice now, but he has undeniable presence and his acting is impeccable. Robert Gleadow is by far the stronger of the two young men. He is completely at home on stage and sings with an agile bass that only gains in richness with every performance. American tenor Paul Appleby has a fine but smallish Italianate voice. In his first main aria he seemed to be singing at full capacity but he noticeably struggled through his second.
As couples, Gleadow and Claire were much more expressive in voice and gesture than were Giunta and Appleby. Having seen Giunta’s lively Cherubino for Opera Atelier, I can only conclude that this was Egoyan’s misguided attempt to try to differentiate the couples.
Johannes Debus conducted from the piano where he accompanied the recitatives. In his account of the overture he had the COC Orchestra play with a much lighter touch than he has before. Yet, once the opera proper began, he shifted into a mode that related Mozart firmly forward into the 19th century and into a heavier, lusher sound than we have become used to in the last 40 years since the period instrument revival.
Egoyan has revised and improved his Salome over the years and one hopes he will revise this Così by eliminating or streamlining much of Hanson’s fussy, over-elaborate decor to focus on bringing out the characters’ complex emotions since that is where his strength really lies.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) Act 1 finale of Così fan tutte; detail of a hemostat from “Las dos Fridas” and Layla Claire holding a giant pair of scissors; Robert Gleadow, Paul Appleby, Wallis Giunta and Layla Claire. ©2014 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2014-01-19
Così fan tutte