At 42, Teodor Currentzis is a bit old to be an enfant terrible, but much of what he says in public suggests that’s how he sees himself. The Greek-born conductor – now a Russian citizen – polarises opinion like few others in the musical world. Those who believe in his talent clearly include the decision-makers at Sony Classical, for the label’s highest-profile project at the moment is a cycle of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas, recorded under studio conditions with Currentzis conducting MusicAeterna, the choir and period-instrument orchestra that he directs at the opera house in Perm, the most easterly city in European Russia.
Così fan Tutte is the second in the series; Figaro appeared last spring, and Don Giovanni is due out next year. The set’s plush booklet includes a lengthy interview with the conductor, which reads like an artistic manifesto. Mozart’s reason for composing Così to what he calls a “grotesque” libretto, Currentzis says, was “to save the world from the cataclysm of the moral ideas and theories of his time” – ideas fostered by the Enlightenment’s “idealised picture of the human being”. Certainly, there’s a crusading zeal about the performance which can seem self-conscious, thrillingly fresh, or just silly. Curentzis’s continuo group includes a lute and a hurdy gurdy as well as a hyperactive fortepianist; phrases are clipped and tempi are extreme; the overture is all over in less than four minutes, pushing the orchestral players to their technical limits, while the sublime trio Soave sia il vento is taken impossibly slowly.
Yet the musical risks only seem occasionally wilful; the orchestral playing is wonderfully alive, and the sense of a score testing the conventions of 18th-century opera buffa (almost to destruction) is everywhere. Whatever one thinks of the individual performances too, there’s no doubt that the cast have all bought into Currentzis’s self-appointed mission; whether it’s in the touches of portamento in Simone Kermes’s account of Fiordiligi’s Come Scoglio, or in the deliberate lack of blending of voices in ensembles, so that Kermes and Malena Ernman as Dorabella always sound distinct, separately characterised. The finest singing, arguably, comes from Kenneth Tarver’s Ferrando and Christopher Maltman’s Guglielmo, and though there’s not a great deal of humour in the performance, Anna Kasyan as Despina and Konstantin Wolff as Don Alfonso both manage to make something of their characters. It’s a recording that’s well worth hearing, even if in the end there are too many mannerisms – too much that doesn’t quite work musically – to make it a version that anyone would want to hear all that often.
