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OPERA REVIEW
June, 24, 2005
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By Robert Commanday
This time they got it right: the San Francisco Opera's summer reprise of last fall's production of Mozart's Così fan tutte. It opened Friday with three changes in personnel that turned the trick. First and most importantly, in place of the “acclaimed” German conductor who paid no attention to the stage and got poor ensemble, there was the gifted Anne Manson. She knew her Mozart. Her style was to conduct the large beats — none of the nervous and show-off jabbing at the accents — and the music could flow. The phrasing came naturally and the ensemble, critical in Così, was exquisite.
Secondly, the youth who played Guglielmo cluelessly in the fall was replaced by a man, Nathan Gunn, admired here for his Figaro (Rossini) in 2004 and his Billy Budd last fall. His intense manner and presence made Guglielmo a keen opposite to the Ferrando of Paul Groves. This Guglielmo had the confident, swaggering bearing that's called for and sets up his comeuppance. Towards the end of the opera, when he has to swallow his anger and jealousy and face the consequences of the game he has been playing, the climax is splendid.
Third, the new Dorabella was the fast-rising former Adler Fellow and Merolina, Katherine Rohrer. She brought high energy, quickness and gingery temperament to the role, setting Dorabella off from her sister unmistakably as the vulnerable, flirtatious and giddy younger sister. The production played up the physical contrast between the small, lithe Rohrer, wearing a blonde marcelled wig, and the tall, smoothly moving dark-haired Alexandra Deshorties, the Fiordiligi. Rohrer's singing was fluid, musical, and with fire (a stirring “Smanie implacabili”), quick comedic takes and funny moves that pointed up the characterization and the comedy.
Frederica von Stade (Despina) Alexandra Deshorties (Fiordiligi) The four principals who returned from the fall production all seemed much surer and in command than they had before. Deshorties put much more variety into her responses, becoming a much more interesting, more nuanced, less purely prudish Fiordiligi, and thus able to bring off higher conflict at the denouement of Ferrando's seduction. Her singing was far more fluent than before. Her Act I “Come scoglio” (Like a rock) was stronger (I prefer it done this way, in the presence of her attempted seducer rather than as a monolog). Even so, the climax of her performance was the great scena “Ei parte . . . Per pietà, ben mio,” with grand singing, impassioned interpretation. It was the opera's high point. Frederica von Stade was an even more in-charge Despina this time, and singing much more clearly and masterfully. The role is just right for her high mezzo and she sounded as fine in her two arias as we have ever heard her. Of course, she let it all out in Despina's two impersonations (the doctor, the notary), every bit the comedienne we have come to expect. Richard Stilwell's Don Alfonso seemed more alive, his delivery as full of nuances, in the best Italian buffo style. He fired off the maxims at the self-confident lovers with the choice ironic manner that he sustained. As the linchpin of the musical ensembles, he was impeccable. The production plays Alfonso as a croupier in the fancy seaside resort/casino. I prefer him as a wealthy nobleman of leisure rather than as a working stiff, but the switch did no real harm.
Nathan Gunn (Gugliemo) Richard Stilwell (Don Alfonso) Paul Groves (Ferrando) Katherine Rohrer (Dorabella) Paul Groves' Ferrando is not the fantasist and romantic that sets up the contrast with Guglielmo. This was most evident in the way he again plunged into the would-be dreamy “Un' aura amorosa” too precipitously, without taking an extra couple of seconds to prepare the mood. It's an atmosphere he doesn't achieve until the mid-point reprise of the opening section. There he finally drops into the smooth piano dynamic that would have captured his listeners at the outset. He is a fine, secure and musical tenor, but corn-fed, often using more voice than needed, and at a level where it has a grainy texture. He does affect a nice boyishness in the role that conveys the naiveté and supports the horseplay he and his pal get into. John Cox' production (shared by San Francisco with Opera Monte Carlo) went smoothly this time, under the direction of Jose Maria Condemi. It is set forward in time to the “eve of World War I,” and the scenes at the resort hotel/casino by the sea are enlivened with the passing back and forth of tourists, bellboys with the luggage, military officers, with chambermaids and servants changing the furniture as needed. It is picturesque in the quasi-period costumes and the mobile set designed by Robert Perdziola. So far so good, but somewhere past the mid-point, Cox starts making a statement about “Love in the time of war” that couldn't have been farther from Mozart's and Da Ponte's minds. The opera's creators had a choice inside joke in the fact that there was no war going on. The “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies” (in which Naples, where Da Ponte specifically located the opera, lay) was at peace from the 1750s until the 1790s. The “war” that the two lovers went off to fight was purely Alfonso's invention. The fact that the two sisters mindlessly accepted it pointed up their inattentiveness to reality, their self-absorption, or modest intelligence level. It's a joke and central to the characterization. But Cox, consistent with the current Opera management's contemporary referencing in almost every opera here, had to drag onto the stage wounded soldiers returning from the battlefield. In Cox' final coup de grace, at the “happy” ending with the lovers restored to each other and reconciled, suddenly a squad of soldiers in full World War I battle gear appear. The captain commandeers Ferrando and Guglielmo and leads them off to the war with his squad. There was never an opera more beautifully and deeply expressive of humanity, and Cox and the San Francisco Opera had the temerity to overwrite it.
(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
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Katherine Rohrer (Dorabella) Nathan Gunn (Gugliemo)
