This year, the Whitsun Festival in Salzburg is dedicated to the city’s most famous son, with the theme “Tutto Mozart”. On its second evening, the festival presented a pasticcio of scenes and arias from the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas. The production featured a silly mise-en-scène and direction that attempted to weave together the disparate situations, reminiscent of a jukebox musical. Such a premise is challenging to execute successfully and it can work under only one condition: the musical and theatrical performances must be outstanding. The Pfingstfestspiele managed to achieve exactly that.
Director Davide Livermore sets the scene in an imaginary ‘Lorenzo da Ponte’ airport, where the main airline is WAM (wink wink). In this airport, passengers face delays, storms, plane crashes, personal tragedies and harrowing farewells, all vividly supported through videos by D-Wok. The gags are funny and well-executed.
For example, the concert was supposed to start with the overture to Le nozze di Figaro. As the curtain rose on the bustling airport, everyone suddenly stops and begins singing the overture for a few bars before the orchestra seamlessly takes over. In the first scene of the same opera, where Figaro measures the room to see if the nuptial bed will fit, Figaro is seen in the airport unfolding a gigantic sheet of instructions for assembling an IKEA-type bed called PHIGÄRØ. Everyone recognised the reference. Everybody laughed.
Gianluca Capuano conducted Les Musiciens du Prince with his characteristic energy, brisk tempi and meticulous attention to detail. He propelled the show forward, seamlessly transitioning from one “sketch” to the next without any drag, with the orchestra following him with conviction. They managed to keep the musical performance at top level, amidst the foolishness.
The cast assembled by the festival's Artistic Director Cecilia Bartoli was stellar. Bartoli herself performed throughout the evening in the soprano range, taking on roles such as Susanna, Fiordiligi and Despina. Having performed all these roles on stage in the past, her upper register remains in excellent form.
The show featured several notable arias. Daniel Behle, perhaps the leading Mozart tenor of our time, performed “Il mio tesoro” and “Un’aura amorosa” with remarkable elegance and lightness. Mélissa Petit delivered a heartbreaking rendition of “Porgi amor” as the Countess, while veteran Alessandro Corbelli sang the Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni to her, which worked surprisingly well as an explanation of the Count's philandering rather than Giovanni's. Corbelli was in remarkably good form, with perfect style, strong vocal support and his usual humorous interpretation.
Lea Desandre portrayed an influencer Despina, imparting her wisdom to a small crowd of followers in “Una donna a quindici anni”. Mattia Olivieri successfully substituted for Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as Figaro and Don Giovanni. Rolando Villazón kept the audience amused throughout with a silly gag of constantly tripping while serving wine as a waiter. He sang “In quegli anni” from Nozze with great panache, despite issues with his vocal delivery.
The hostess, Bartoli, reserved for herself Mozart’s finest concert aria, Ch’io mi scordi di te, performed with no less than Daniil Trifonov on the piano obbligato; the performance was stunning. All other scenes were ensembles from the Mozart-Da Ponte operas. Bartoli portrayed Despina disguised as a doctor in Così fan tutte, entering dressed as an oriental guru, wielding a gigantic marijuana joint as her miracle cure, and sang the entire scene with a squeezed nasal voice (yet perfectly in tune).
Mezzo-soprano Anna Tetruashvili was a convincing Dorabella in several ensembles from Così. The chorus, comprising Il canto l’Orfeo and the Salzburg Bach Choir admirably sang two excerpts from the oratorio Davide Penitente, featuring music from the Mass in C minor and text attributed to Da Ponte. The concert concluded with nearly the entire Act 2 finale from Nozze.
Afterwards, director Livermore took the stage and, in Italian, recited verses with a message about facing life’s difficulties with lightness, wishing everyone that, whatever our journey, “Soave sia il vento” (let the wind be gentle). The entire cast joined in the famous trio from Così, while Bartoli and Olivieri, as Figaro and Susanna, dressed in Dirndl and Lederhosen, ascended in a hot-air balloon against a dreamy backdrop.
