Well finally!
It takes a long time before this evening finds a density and concentration that is appropriate for “Così fan tutte” for almost ten minutes.
The soprano Louise Alder sings "Per pietà".
The grand rondo is a desperate act of self-suggestion.
Fiordiligi tries to organize her feelings and still fend off a seduction that is already well advanced.
She works her way into the bliss of an old relationship that no longer exists.
A spot on the empty stage is enough.
The voice does the rest, capturing Mozart's E major abysses down to the depths of soul and pitch.
Louise Alder triumphed with her willingness to identify and with her singing skills.
It's the event of the evening.
Unfortunately the only one.
The director Benedict Andrews prays in the program booklet what you can read about the complexity of Mozart's "School of Lovers".
But his production knows nothing about it.
The fact that it should be about desire, as was obsessively repeated beforehand, is not made plausible by the fact that plastic dicks pop up, sperm glows in fluorescent paint on a graffiti spread across the stage or Dorabella performs her second aria in underwear.
"Così fan tutte" is a piece about a change of identity, about the relationship between teaching and emptiness, about the turning point in the private and political sense of the times.
In Munich it is reduced to the question of free sex, voyeurism and the allure of polygamy.
Pompous and formulated with Slavoj Žizek, it should be about the "missed absolute" in love.
Sadomaso games between Don Alfonso and Despina or sliding actions on the hood of an SUV, whose connection to the main sponsor of the Bavarian State Opera is certainly purely coincidental, contribute little to this.
One of the more subtle ideas is a Playmobil castle, which initially serves as a toy and later becomes inflatable so that its gate resembles a vulva and the turrets rise phallically (stage: Magda Willi).
With so much pubescent quark, one is thankful that the finale of the first act is hidden behind oleander bushes,
The troubles of everyday life
Do you really have to remember how Christof Loy dealt with "Così fan tutte" at the Salzburg Festival in Corona times?
This Munich company provokes yet another comparison.
Patrice Chéreau, a director who captured desire in his films to the limit of the bearable, was clever enough not to reduce "Così fan tutte" to that.
In Aix-en-Provence he staged a musical structure using scenic means.
The fact that this is out of the question now also has something to do with the conductor.
A CD recording was recently released, on which Vladimir Jurowski and the Bavarian State Orchestra brilliantly succeed in conveying the wit and severity of Beethoven's second symphony.
Old music and a modern sense of time intertwine.
Everything lives, sparkles, breathes.
"Così fan tutte" has nothing to do with the level of this recording, which was made in 2020 when Jurowski was preparing to become music director in Munich.
The spring of love between orchestra and conductor seems to have passed.
It sounds more like everyday troubles now.
There is often a lack of coordination.
One can follow and hear that exaggerated control, as practiced by Jurowski, in no way leads to precision.
Aura, unfathomable calm or serene dialectics, such as Mozart's music always has at hand, rarely appear.
The tempos are idiosyncratic.
They squint for originality without finding it.
The terzettino "Soave sia il vento", for example, with which Mozart says goodbye to more than two lovers who soon return masked, does not have to be celebrated as a melancholy contemplation.
It is not coincidentally notated in alla breve time.
As rushed as he is now in Munich, however, his compositional delicacy withers away, as does his courage to take harmonic risks, and the famous, placeless and yet precise peppermint chord that Mozart places on the word “desir” fizzles out, as if one should be ashamed of it.
Slutty screwball
Nice to hear the little duet 'Al fato dan legge' and Ferrando's big B flat major aria – both numbers that are almost always deleted.
It's unfortunate that they go hand in hand with scenic idleness.
The tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp saves what can be saved, although he apologizes for being indisposed because of the consequences of Corona.
It's also nice that the fortepiano and cimbalom are used in the continuo group.
However, both could have ventured far more out of cover.
The choir remains banished to the proscenium boxes.
Christian Gerhaher has recently sung far heavier things with Lear, Posa and Wozzeck than the role of Don Alfonso, which was new to him.
He gives her recitatives and ensembles the usual sophisticated diction.
Konstantin Krimmel as Guilelmo also has a wealth of song experience.
Avery Amereau remains a spirited and reliable Dorabella.
What a subtle singer Sandrine Piau is, fades into the background in the face of the slutty bogeyman she has to play as Despina all the time.
Pieces of this rank, however, can sometimes refuse helpless, sometimes daringly self-confident scenic approaches.
They close themselves off.
The evening lasts four hours.
Nevertheless, "Così fan tutte" as a dizzying risk in terms of content and aesthetics, as a hot-cold attempt at the "necessità del core" that the music and text tell about, does not take place.
Serge Dorny's second season as Artistic Director of the Bavarian State Opera begins with a placeholder.