Harmlessly sunny Mozart melts away
The Marriage of Figaro Welsh National Opera/ Wales Millennium Centre ★★★
It may be hard to pinpoint anything that’s seriously wrong with Welsh National Opera’s new staging of Le Nozze di
Figaro, but it’s even harder to find anything that’s seriously right about it either.
In a first-class performance, this is a masterpiece that can leave you proud to be human and glad to be alive; here it passes the time pleasantly and melts in the memory the moment the music stops. How much thought did the director Tobias Richter put into the show, and how much time did he spend rehearsing it? Precious little, judging by the perfunctory result.
Some inconsequential faffing around during the overture and between the acts shows the stagehands bustling about, reminding us (as if we needed to be) this is all a play and an illusion. To reinforce this, the modernist furnishings of Ralph Koltai’s set sit in contrast to Sue Blane’s gorgeous rococo costumes, and the two large revolving panels that form their backdrop are decorated with only abstract imagery.
Aside from that, there’s nothing to note: no depth of emotion, no complexity of mood, no tension in interaction. We are left one step away from pantomime, with the characters presented as little more than puppets, jiggling up and down.
What dramatic energy there is comes from Jeremy Sams’ translation – a largely fluent and idiomatic job, marred only by some vulgar expletives and overly clever Gilbertian rhyming couplets unjustified by the tone of da Ponte’s original libretto. Someone should have been reminded that comedy is not the same thing as farce.
In the pit was WNO’s music director Lothar Koenigs, who leaves at the end of this season after a triumphant seven-year tenure. Broadly speaking, his bent is romantic rather than classical, and although I don’t think he was born a Mozartian, he gave a lively, even pugnacious account of the mercurial score, keeping the orchestra on its toes: he never lets it off lightly.
Nobody in the cast stood out, and nobody let the side down. Perhaps Elizabeth Watts should have waited a year or two before singing the Countess – there were moments when one sensed her drawing on vocal reserves – but she gave warm and shapely accounts of both her arias. As her errant husband, Mark Stone fell victim to the non-production, over-egging the snarling, leering hauteur as though he was auditioning for Captain Hook and never hitting the note of blustering vulnerability that makes his behaviour plausible. His final reconciliation with his wife left me totally unmoved.
Anna Devin and David Stout sang freshly and cleanly as Susanna and Figaro, but neither was made to dig any deeper than the top layer: did Richter even register the fact that they are servants, and that servants tend to be exploited and resentful?
Squired by Richard Wiegold’s lugubrious old bloodhound of a Bartolo, Susan Bickley’s Marcellina made a stately progress and was granted her usually excised fourth-act aria, which she sang as gracefully as its triteness allows. Naomi O’Connell’s Cherubino was anodyne and insufficiently boyish – one felt that Rhian Lois’s feisty Barbarina would have made mincemeat of him-her.
If all this sounds grudging – and make no mistake, the show is in sum a harmlessly sunny affair – Michael Clifton-Thompson, a stalwart of WNO’s fabulous chorus, deserves praise for standing in for an indisposed Alan Oke as Don Basilio. Sharply observed and crisply articulated, his performance was every bit as good as anyone’s.
Box office 029 2063 6464; wno.org.uk. Until Feb 26, then touring