 |
 |
|
 |
||
|
Mozart
La Finta Giardiniera Zurich Opera (live, 23/25 February 2006)
Eva Mei (Sandrina) TDK DVD: OPFINT
Zurich's sophisticated take on La Finta Giardiniera (not to be confused with the 12-year old Mozart's La Finta Semplice) is a triumph of collaboration between Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conducting Zurich's period instrument orchestra, and Tobias Moretti, a brilliant stage director who achieves miracles of opera singing/acting. I believe Mozart would take the points and love it as we did, because it never contradicts or undermines music which is decent and made to seem better in this context than it perhaps really is. Not a dull moment, the eyes preventing attention wandering from the sound. The first act, set in a garden of cactuses, is one of the funniest I have ever seen on operatic DVD. The second, a mirror image of the librettist(s) plotting, has all descending into 'magical confusion', and the partial resolution in the last is in a bitter-sweet mood of 'depression - a kind of lyrical powerlessness'. It ends without the anticipated triumph of love. Emerging as "maybe the most underappreciated of Mozart's operas - - as significant a milestone in Mozart's musical development as Idomeneo" this invaluable release is a marvellous vindication of theatrical updating and DVD technology, with perfectly balanced sound and camera work which makes more of the jokes than you might get in the opera house; that and the unexpected lack of a "feel good" conclusion may explain the slightly luke-warm response to the show in the only live review in English I've come across. Don't miss it. Mozart La Finta Giardiniera - - the work of a young genius driven in a new direction by a dark and irresistibly powerful force - - (Abert) The Covent Garden production of this "not quite a masterpiece" (John Eliot Gardiner) vindicates its revivals in the current "Mozart year" and should assure it regular future performances and even maybe eventual inclusion in "the canon". The opera's genesis stems from Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which spawned a plethora of plays and operas, Piccini's La buona figliola unprecedently successful. La Finta Giardiniera is a marvellous exploration of fraught human relationships, and I am glad that both productions resist the hollow "happy ending"( Patrizia Biccirè). The programme book is full of illuminating essays to put this problem opera in context. Researched by Gardiner and incorporating new critical discoveries (Berke 2004 - yet to be published) this is a worthy recreation, put across from pit and stage with total conviction. The presentation is darker than Moretti's, more Drama than giocoso, and the staging not entirely satisfactory; from the back stalls one cannot see the water in the garden pool around which the action revolves, with glimpses of splashing and one immersion. The disguised heroine's frock seemed wrong for her assumed role? But musical values were strong; Gardiner seeming to want to outdo Harnoncourt in the pungency of the orchestra's contribution, and the all-round singing quality is admirable. Annika Haller handles the final get-together of Count and Marchioness with exactly the right equivocation - they'll give the relationship another try, but without any confidence that it'll work... Not to be missed, and do treat yourself to the DVD too. Peter Grahame Woolf Photo credit Bill Cooper (Robert Murray replacing Christoph Strehl) |
'Healing lies elsewhere, probably in the music', concludes Tobias Moretti's thoughtful essay. 
Kurt Streit, Genia Kühmeier, Robert Murray, Camilla Tilling, Sophie Koch, Patrizia Biccirè, Christopher Maltman English Baroque Soloists/ John Eliot Gardiner