Peter Konwitschny's new production of Cosi Fan Tutte examines sex as an eruptive force of nature that needs to be accepted as such if we are ever to live with it. "I seem to have Vesuvius in my breast," Dorabella sings, as her growing desire for Guglielmo sweeps thoughts of Ferrando from her mind. Nature, of which she is a part, convulses appropriately with her words: she and Guglielmo snaffle round each other like animals, as steam hisses through the floor and lava trickles round their feet.
Konwitschny has redefined Mozart's masterpiece in terms of the culture that produced it. Cosi is contemporaneous with the works of Sade, Rousseau and Laclos, and has much in common with their philosophies of natural amorality and their ideas that society sees sex as a game, the rules of which are inevitably broken by the emotions it arouses. Dietrich Henschel's Don Alfonso is no cynical rationalist, but a Sadean nihilist, so alienated by experience that he can only find pleasure in the extremes of Russian roulette, sexual strangulation games with Anne Bolstad's embittered Despina, and the conversion of others to his world of erotic manipulation and danger.
We first encounter Fiordiligi and Dorabella (Maria Bengtsson and Stella Doufexis), meanwhile, as teenagers, inhabiting an Edenic garden and clutching soldier dolls that represent their idealised lovers. Both girls, however, are avid for the erotic experiences that only their disguised partners can provide. The dolls are eventually consigned to mothballs, and Ferrando and Guglielmo (Johannes Chum and Michael Nagy) are soon clinging to each other in despair as their illusions implode. Nature, meanwhile, flourishes, rages and subsides around them with every emotional shift.
Yet Alfonso's world view is ultimately blinkered. Mozart writes great love duets to delineate experiences that he can only perceive as casual betrayal, and, at the end, Henschel crumples as Konwitschny builds to an unusually upbeat finale that celebrates sexual fluidity in all its diversity. The savagery and tenderness of the production are reflected in Kirill Petrenko's conducting, while the singing, apart from a few moments of shrillness from Bolstad, is excellent. Bengtson and Doufexis's voices twine beautifully in their duets. Chum and Nagy are athletic, sexy and vulnerable. Henschel gives the performance of a lifetime. Astonishing stuff, it demands to be seen.
· Until December 30. Box office: 0049 30 47 99 74 00.
