“All the world’s a stage,” said Shakespeare. Director Jan Philipp Gloger appears to agree.He sets his new Royal Opera production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” in a mashed-up world of meta-theatre, in which characters slip between worlds of ostensible reality and ironic artifice. Ben Baur’s handsome sets provide some amusing locations – including a fake theatre with ghostly footlights, a foyer of the Royal Opera House, a stylized garden of Eden, and a 1940s railway platform which floats away into the sky – to delight the eye and keep one guessing about the layers of reality.It’s not a bad premise for an opera in which two men disguise themselves as strangers in order to test their fiancées’ fidelity. In Gloger’s reading, we’re invited to believe that the women guess the ruse and decide to play along with it. It works well for the majority of the opera to think that the fiancées are slyly turning the tables, but towards the end the music pulls too strongly against the premise. When Fiordiligi (Corinne Winters) pours out her torment in “Per pietà” and then succumbs to the rapture of forbidden love in the duet “Fra gli amplessi”, it’s clear Mozart isn’t being ironic but the staging doesn’t quite support this emotional truth.Fortunately there’s truth aplenty in the pit. Conductor Semyon Bychkov provides a beautifully restrained and transparent account of the score, which allows the (mostly) young voices to soar. Top honors go to tenor Daniel Behle (Ferrando), whose ravishing delivery of “Un aura” was a moment of pure Mozartian heaven.With her impressively weighty voice, Corinne Winters isn’t perhaps an ideal Fiordiligi, but she has a thrilling stage presence and offers an intriguing and detailed performance. Angela Brower and Alessio Arduini make an attractive couple – both musically and physically - as the secondary lovers Dorabella and Guglielmo.Johannes Martin Kränzle is an enjoyably Machiavellian Don Alfonso too. And although Sabina Puértolas (Despina) is unfocussed in her stagecraft, too often flapping her arms like a broken windmill, she compensates with a voice of gorgeous limpidity.“Così fan tutte” is in repertoire at the Royal Opera House. www.roh.org.uk
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