MILAN — A masterly synthesis of balanced drama, pitch-perfect music, and deep human perception, Così fan tutte can be confidently presented with a minimum of directorial intervention. Or it can be recast as a contemporary reality show, complete with onstage cameras, jumbo screens, a control room, and a studio audience, all in a setting dominated by a bubblegum palette. You might be able to guess which approach Robert Carsen has adopted in the production of Mozart’s 1790 opera buffa now on offer at La Scala.
You might also be surprised, as this veteran Canadian is better known for stark minimalism of the sort seen in October in a revival of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. We cannot know whether the popularity in the summer of 2023 of the film Barbie had any bearing on Carsen’s stylistic about-face, but it is a reasonable hypothesis.
Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto does offer a few easy targets for updating. Don Alfonso can be dressed in a suit and reworked as a sarcastic master of ceremonies. The maid Despina will do as a studio sidekick. As for the central foursome of lovers, they behave with an impulsiveness that can be reasonably considered timeless and adaptable to “La scuola degli amanti” (as the television broadcast, drawing on the opera’s subtitle of “The School of Lovers,” is called).
But what is the point of this retrofitting? To freshen up a well-worn classic? The modern properties — the swimming pool, bar stools, and retro refrigerator — seemed dated in their own right. The enormous projected aircraft carrier of Act 1 looked like something from a 20-year-old video game. Wardrobe was erratic. Not knowing what to do about those pesky “Albanians” — Ferrando and Guglielmo in elaborate disguise — the costume master Luis Carvalho dressed them in basic black, entirely disregarding the dramatic need to make them seem like strangers to their sweethearts.
The performance on Nov. 12 was nevertheless invigorated by the virtues opera lovers expect (and Milanese subscribers demand) from this famous house. French soprano Elsa Dreisig as Fiordiligi was rightly cheered for her athletic “Come scoglio,” but the zenith of the evening was a “Per pietà” that was deeply affecting (despite the gratuitous simulcast on a giant screen).
Dutch mezzo-soprano Nina van Essen was handsome to hear as Dorabella; Italian baritone Luca Micheletti projected boldly as the furious Guglielmo. There have been more meltingly lyrical treatments of “Un’aura amorosa,” but no one could doubt the sincerity of Ferrando as played by the Italian tenor Giovanni Sala. Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley, rich-toned in his mid-sixties, made a charismatic Don Alfonso. If the French soprano Sandrine Piau seemed less than full-powered as Despina, this might have been due partly to a glittery gown that outshone her voice.
Add to all of the above the potent La Scala chorus and a responsive orchestra led briskly and exactingly by the British conductor Alexander Soddy, and you have an evening that produced as much audio pleasure as it did visual exasperation. It is worth a footnote that this presumably costly extravaganza supplants a fine period production by Michael Hampe (sets by Mauro Pagano) that La Scala presented in 2021. Have a look at the RAI video on YouTube.
Less than an hour by train from Milan is Bergamo, birthplace of Gaetano Donizetti and the setting of Donizetti Opera 2025 in the (you guessed it) Teatro Donizetti, a beautiful house of 1780s vintage. The mission of this annual festival is to stage neglected works by the master, of which there are quite a few.
The opener on Nov. 14 was Caterina Cornaro, the last opera by Donizetti to be given its premiere during the composer’s lifetime. It is a spirited and tuneful score. The title character (1454-1510) was the last monarch of Cyprus, a Crusader state viewed covetously by Venice. Not surprisingly, the librettist Giacomo Sacchero interlaced the geopolitics of the story with a matrix of amorous complications, principal of which is the forced renunciation by Caterina of her young French fiancé Gerardo (the lead tenor) in favor of Lusignano, the King of Cyprus (a noble baritone). Mocenigo is the malevolent bass-register emissary from the Venetian Council of Ten.
Caterina Cornaro was meddled with by the censors before its first performance in 1844 (at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples). The Donizetti festival has taken pride in hosting the premiere of a new Ricordi critical edition (under the baton of festival artistic director Riccardo Frizza) based on the manuscript.
But the original materials were not good enough for director Francesco Micheli and his creative staff, who were moved (as company dramaturg Alberto Mattioni writes in the printed program) by an urge “to tell the story of this heroine to today’s audience, to give them a framework of reference and to discover what is present in that past.”
Thus the performance begins not in the Cornaro palace but in a contemporary hospital waiting room (testing equipment audible) where the title character is waiting for news of the status of her pregnancy. I think the opera itself — with handsome Renaissance costuming and an evocative backdrop of Romanesque arches — is supposed to be the product of young Caterina’s imagination. I think.
Rather than attempt to recount the many alternations between then and now made possible by a rotating stage, I shall report simply that the traditional call to arms of Act 2 takes place during surgery (needles wielded as swords), and the king dies on a gurney. For unclear reasons, the titles of arias and ensembles were projected in large lettering onstage.
As is traditional in Europe after such performances, there were both bravos and boos when Micheli and his accomplices took their bows, with the latter expression clearly predominant. And there were cheers for the all-Italian cast, led by the dramatically engaging Carmela Remigio as Caterina and the sympathetic Vito Priante as Lusignano. Riccardo Fassi was a richly villainous Mocenigo and Enea Scala applied a brilliant spinto — it must be said, a tad relentlessly — to the heroic part of Gerardo.
The chorus on loan from La Scala made a strong impression. The stirring opening sequence has proven difficult to remove from my musical consciousness. Caterina Cornaro has repertoire potential. Donizetti Opera 2025 got it half right.
