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Philippe Auguin’s conducting is decent, but does nothing to help the opera cohere, and so it tends to lapse into a routine of hit tunes, received by a deadpan audience on its opening night.
ENO’s The Marriage of Figaro was accorded an icy critical reception on its first appearance in November, and, though I enjoyed it more than most people seem to have, I can see why. Olivia Fuchs’s production has its share of irritations, though she has eliminated some of the more gratuitous ones, such as painted pictures taking on a life of their own. And she has done nothing to convince me that updating Figaro to the 1920s is a good idea, because the premise on which the action is based, that the Count has renounced the right to sleep with a bride on his estate on her wedding night, is absurd in this context. Articles in the excellent programme argue that this right never existed anywhere anyway, but clearly, from the response of audiences, first to Beaumarchais’s play, then to Mozart’s opera, it wasn’t seen as being hopelessly implausible.
Fuchs seems to have enjoyed giving her designers the chance to create Art Deco rooms and furnishings, and Twenties costumes, and they have obliged in masterly fashion. And Jeremy Sams’s updated translation, of which an amazingly high proportion of the words comes across clearly, is the wittiest I can imagine, and does a lot to help bring the characters to vivid life.
The cast, again different from the first one, is just as uneven. The wonderful centre of this performance is the Countess of Susan Gritton: glamorous and tragic, her voice almost painful in its beauty, even her first aria delivered with a kind of despairing poise. And although the intrigues she is party to humiliate her, she finds them funny, too, just as she reciprocates Cherubino’s ardour to an unusual degree. Unfortunately, the Susanna of Sarah Tynan has nothing but pertness and a pretty voice. This most three-dimensional of all Mozart’s women characters is here an air-headed soubrette. Scott Hendricks’s Count looks the part, but generates no erotic intensity; while Iain Paterson’s Figaro is warm, authoritative, if a bit head-waiterly. I saw the second performance. André de Ridder’s conducting was tolerable, but his inability to co-ordinate stage and orchestra was not, the singers obviously wanting (and rightly) to move things along faster than he was prepared to.
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