‘Così fan tutte’ goes back to the '60s

Così ’s plot, you will recall, concerns an older man who bets two soldiers that their fiancées (who happen to be sisters) won’t stay faithful to them. A woman’s constancy, he warns, is like the phoenix: Everyone talks about it but no one has ever seen it. The opera’s title literally means, "Thus do all [women]"— a sad commentary on the sexual attitudes of European men during Europe’s so-called Enlightenment.

The soldiers accept the bet and put on disguises in order to woo each other’s fiancées and seduce them. And both men succeed. But really, how could the girls fail to recognize their own lovers?

An Academy of Vocal Arts production in 2007 tried to answer that question by portraying the girls as adolescents, hence immature and fickle, which didn’t really address the recognition issue. But last month, director Nic Muni tackled the issue by setting AVA’s latest production in the hallucinogenic 1960s. Finally we have a Così that’s credible.

Class conflict

In Da Ponte’s 1790 libretto, the boys pretend to sail off to battle and return disguised as mustachioed Albanians. In Muni’s translation, they say they have to ship out to Vietnam, then return in hippie regalia, with full beards. The girls are so stoned on a hookah pipe that they can’t recognize their own lovers. What’s more, the drugs cause the girls to relax their inhibitions and indulge in their fantasies of sexual experimentation.

Mozart and Da Ponte called attention to inequalities between the titled and the ordinary people. In this production the class system was economic. The young couples are privileged folk who attended Harvard and Vassar and summered on Martha’s Vineyard. Despina is their oppressed domestic who asks, “Why should they get the taste and I only the smell?”

(Muni’s text was projected above the stage, while the arias were sung in the traditional Italian.)

AVA novelty

The six principals— all first-year AVA students, a novelty for a school whose older students already own extensive résumés— looked attractive and sounded fine. Soprano Melinda Whittington was a fiery Fiordiligi, singing the opera’s most challenging arias, a powerful “Come scoglio” (“Strongly founded”) when she resisted temptation and a touching “Per pieta” (“For mercy”) after she succumbed. Mezzo Julia Dawson was adorable as Dorabella, Jonas Hacker and Michael Adams were stalwart as the soldiers Ferrando and Guglielmo, Daniel Noyola commanding as Alfonso, Anush Avetisyan tempting as Despina.

Christofer Macatsoris conducted the orchestra magnificently, with lilt and pensiveness and anger where each was called for.