Festival Opera

Cosi fan tutti

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

five stars

IN the early years of the Edinburgh International Festival, audiences were apparently content to see the same Glyndebourne production of Mozart's masterpiece return three times with different casts. 2016's brilliantly conceived and realised reading of the work is in every sense a product of our modern world, an international co-production that originated earlier this summer at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, with a stellar international cast, a chorus from Cape Town Opera, and the superb players of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Jeremie Rhorer in the pit.

That period band musical component is just once aspect that this Cosi shares with the staging of Bellini's Norma from Salzburg that so wonderfully began the Festival three weeks ago. Like that production, Christophe Honore's equally large scale and precisely detailed interpretation establishes the context of this setting of the story – in Mussolini's African colony of Eritrea in the 1930s – before we hear a note of music. And when that famous overture does kick in, the fizzing playing of the Freiburgers is the soundtrack to sexual action that may mean you never hear it quite the same way again. We are in a racist, misogynistic and exploitative world, that not only resolves all of the "problems" with the piece, often ascribed to the different attitudes acceptable at the time of Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte, but also pointedly reflects many of the difficulties of our own day.

With superb performances in every role – alongside the precise portrayals of each of four lovers, Rod Gilfry and Sandrine Piau are quite definitive characterisations of Don Alfonso and Despina – this feast of great tunes and ensemble pieces is also magnificently sung. Flawless.