United States Aspen Music Pageant 2025 [6] – Mozart, Così fan tutte: Soloists, Refrain and Orchestra of Aspen Opera Theatre and VocalARTS / Patrick Summers (conductor). Wheeler Opera Home, Aspen, 21.7.2025. (HS)
A few of Mozart’s most interesting music for each voice and orchestra makes folks flock to Cosi fan tutte, even when the storyline can rattle at this time’s social priorities. The plot revolves round a wager between two younger males and their older, extra skilled good friend who maintains that ladies can’t stay trustworthy. After all, the boys’ girlfriends have their very own, extra mature girl good friend, who insists that it’s the males who’re untrue. Neither is completely right, however star soprano Renée Fleming’s new staging makes it clear that the ladies get the quick finish of the merciless trick the boys play on them. With out altering a phrase of the libretto or a be aware of the music, she engineered an ending through which they get what they need and the lads don’t.
There’s much more to Fleming’s first foray into stage directing. Cosi opened Monday with the primary of three performances on the Aspen Music Pageant, the place she and conductor Patrick Summers run Aspen Opera Theatre and VocalARTs. A forged of sprightly younger singers seemed and acted their components impressively, and the viewers response was enthusiastic
Though the title interprets roughly to ‘all ladies are like that’, in a number of pre-opening interviews Fleming identified the subtitle: ‘The College for Lovers’. The staging emphasizes that side: all of us have lots to study love and lust which makes for a kind of coming-of-age story.
Setting the motion in 1980 coastal Massachusetts as an alternative of the unique’s late-eighteenth-century Naples truly made the emotional particulars – and there are many them within the second act – resonate higher with a contemporary viewers. The timing precedes the web and social media, so the high-school-age girls and boys are nonetheless attempting to determine all of it out.
1980 additionally coincides with a health craze (assume Jane Fonda, the film Rocky and the daybreak of recent professional wrestling), and the motion right here facilities on a gymnasium which supplies the ladies some company by making them as bodily energetic because the boys. Glittery costumes related to professional wrestling go a great distance to enhance the disguises for the boys as every woos the opposite’s girlfriend. It will get nearer to plausible than something I’ve seen in dozens of different productions. The get-ups for the ‘physician’ and the ‘notary’ had been additionally nicely crafted.
On this setting, Alfonso (a world-weary thinker within the unique) is an ex-boxer who owns the gymnasium and drinks excessively, and Despina (the ladies’ maid) is the gymnasium supervisor promoting health drinks to make more money. Ferrando is portrayed as nerdy and Guglielmo as athletic, lusting after the ladies however clueless. The sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, are completely different in their very own methods, however everybody within the forged displays the intentions of the unique characters properly.
Fleming’s course finds particulars within the motion to answer the music, typically with a tellingly timed gesture or a change of expression. And there’s some enjoyable available at any time when Mozart’s music will get bouncy and the ladies (and non-singing mates in health put on) break into rhythmic workout routines.
The genius of all this reveals within the crucial Act II scenes the place the wooing of the opposite boy’s girlfriend (and watching her be tempted) brings up disturbing emotions, and the forged displays it. In the long run, the younger ladies carve out their very own method somewhat than accept the standard selection of who finally ends up with whom (some extent that the unique libretto sidesteps). The younger ladies take over the gymnasium, Dorabella connects with Alfonso, Fiordiligi dons an ‘ERA Now’ sweatshirt, Despina departs for a greater life in Boston, and the boys are deservedly minimize adrift.
As for the music, Summers drew energetic, sensitively balanced and insightful performances from the orchestra and vocalists. All of the singers delivered the acquainted arias nicely, and so they sounded nice collectively within the many duets and ensembles. The standouts had been soprano Laura Miah as Despina, whose participation anchored so lots of the duets and ensembles, and mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Brown as Dorabella, particularly in her Act II aria, ‘È amore un ladroncello’. Additionally notable had been baritone Finn Sagal as Guglielmo, significantly in his duet scenes with mezzo-soprano Brown. Tenor Jonghyun Park discovered the wonder in ‘Un’aura amorosa’ when he fails (at first) to win over Fiordiligi and thinks he’s successful the wager.
For her half, soprano Lauren Carroll had the heavy lifting together with her Act I aria, ‘Come scoglio’, and an excellent higher aria in Act II, ‘Per pietà, ben mio, perdona’. As Alfonso, Peter Barber’s stable bass-baritone by no means flagged, and he seemed the a part of a hunky ex-boxer.
Harvey Steiman
Manufacturing:
Director – Renée Fleming
Choreographer – Sara Erde
Scenic designer – Michelle Harvey
Costume designer – Amanda Seymour
Lighting designer – Josh Hemmo
Wrestling guide – Jacob O’Shea
Forged:
Fiordiligi – Lauren Carroll
Dorabella – Ashlyn Brown
Ferrando – Jonghyun Park
Guglielmo – Finn Sagal
Despina – Laura Miah
Don Alfonso – Peter Barber
