Welsh National Opera's production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte was Calixto Bieito's first operatic staging in the UK. When it opened in February 2000, it produced nothing like the outrage that accompanied his English National Opera versions of Don Giovanni and A Masked Ball, and many of those who subsequently howled in fury at his London productions found it unremarkable at the time. It does contain in embryo the unsteady mix of elements that made him notorious: an explicit, if embittered, view of sexuality; overt filmic and absurdist references (in this case to Almodovar, and Ionesco's The Chairs); the use of opera as an exploration of existential alienation in a contemporary urban hell. It also, however, exposes the flaw in Bieito's methodology, namely his willingness to divorce stage action from text and score.
He sets the opera in a cafe that gradually turns into a bar/sex club where the four lovers enact their traumatic emotional games while other couples, among them Alfonso and Despina, indulge in loveless copulation against walls or on tabletops. Ferrando and Guglielmo, much given to clutching each other's crotches, are a pair of heartless jerks. Fiordiligi and Dorabella, showing off designer gear like strutting catwalk models, are vainly empty-headed. Alfonso is a lush and Despina a chain-smoking feminist, whose disguises parody female stereotypes as she mutates first into a vibrator-brandishing hooker (in place of Mozart's mesmerist with a magnet), then a dumb blonde.
The problem lies less in the upfront innuendo than in the tone. Bieito is contemptuous where Mozart is compassionate. The score's sadness is countered by theatrical cynicism. Musically things are comparably awkward, and there is a sense throughout of the score being straitjacketed to fit Bieito's concept. The conductor, Antony Walker, crashes through it, replacing subtlety with speed and leaving the singers to struggle.
Neither Alwyn Mellor, hampered by an unwieldy vibrato, nor Nora Sourouzian, plummy and cumbersome, give much pleasure as Fiordiligi and Dorabella. Their lovers are better matched, with Neal Davies a handsome Guglielmo and Mark Wilde an elegant, focused Ferrando. The best performances come from Donald Maxwell as Alfonso and Linda Kitchen as Despina. Both are at ease with Bieito's concept on stage, and both sing Mozart as he should be sung: with a genuine understanding of the pain that lies beneath the wit and beauty of the surface.
·Until May 25. Box office: 029-2087 8889. Then tours to Bristol, Llandudno, Oxford, Southampton and Plymouth.
