Word: cosy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...question now arises at the Pepsico Summerfare festival in Purchase, N.Y., where Sellars' versions of the three operas that Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte are all being restaged. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is set in Manhattan's Trump Tower, Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem and Cosi fan tutte (1790) in a sleazy diner called Despina's. Nor does the Sellars game end ) there. At 31, the aging enfant terrible is talking of deconstructing Idomeneo in Brussels and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne...
This tormented sensibility also afflicts Sellars' gloomy version of Cosi. It is full of visual gags (the two heroes pretending to go to war are waved on by crowds carrying signs such as BURN THE SUPREME COURT), but it has very little of Mozart's cynical vivacity. The plot derives from a rather cruel bet: two young men agree to adopt disguises and try to seduce each other's fiancees. Alas, it proves all too easy, but after a reasonable amount of tears and outcries, everyone is reconciled at the end. Not in Sellars' version. Here they finish...
Smaller companies, such as the Santa Fe Opera and Opera Theater of St. Louis, offer off-season stimulation, and Director Peter Sellars has made a reputation scandalizing the bourgeoisie, for example, setting Mozart's Cosi fan tutte in Despina's Coffee Shop. Still, dullness prevails in the largest companies, where opera is viewed as a closed, dead art; innovation is largely a guerrilla endeavor carried on by partisans hiding out in the hills...
Indeed they do. Whether she sports Despina's serving-girl mufti in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, is decked out in the rococo raiment of Sophie in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, or sweeps glamorously onto a concert stage dressed in one of her custom-made Rouben Ter-Arutunian gowns, it is impossible to imagine Battle's ever taking a letter or raising a ruler again. She is an ethereal Nannetta in Verdi's Falstaff, a sparkling Zerbinetta in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos and a beguiling Susanna in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which she will sing...
Perhaps the flaws on Cosi Fan Tutti stem from the fact that Squeeze put the LP together in the studio before trying their stuff out live. If the songs on this record had begun as live riffs, spontaneous bits of popish nonsense in the best Squeeze tradition, they might have gone somewhere. Rather, the Fab-Four-that-almost-was (they're actually five now) worked very hard on pulling off a masterpiece in the sterile confines of an airless studio. The result doesn't snap, it rarely crackles, and it never pops...