Cosi Fan Tutte.

COSI FAN TUTTE

Virgin Classics

00946 344716 9 5

(2DVDs)

This controversial Cosi fan tutte also comes from the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. It, too, features Daniel Harding with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and focuses on a star director--in this case, Patrice Chereau, best known in opera for his revolutionary, centennial staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth in 1976. Here the 62-year-old Frenchman, clearly a man of ideas, takes on Mozart and Da Ponte's comedy in a way that is bound to divide opinion.

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Set on the stage of a stark, empty Italian theatre, Chereau's Cosi is a relatively dark take on a work usually portrayed as "bubbly and light-hearted." While some may welcome the freshness of this approach, others will find it cold--if not downright cynical. But as Chereau says in a program note, "Why shouldn't Cosi be something other than bubbly and light-hearted?... For it deals with complex issues, speaking to us all of the all-pervasiveness of desire, showing us that one can have love for more than one person at a time and that there is infinite sorrow in discovering this, and some little sweetness in accepting it." The opera ends, he continues, with "not a hint of bitterness: no, just a beautiful sadness, profound and yet bearable, a melancholy such as one doesn't die of, but which leaves a lasting scar."

Chereau assembled a respectable cast, led by the veteran Italian bass-baritone, Ruggero Raimondi, as Don Alfonso. Canadian soprano Erin Wall is a formidable Fiordiligi and Barbara Bonney a wily Despina. Stephane Degout and Shawn Mathey flesh out the cast as Guglielmo and Ferrando, but it is the Latvian mezzo Elena Garanca who steals most of the vocal honors with her sumptuously sung Dorabella.