Cosi fan tutte, Longborough Festival Opera

Each country-house opera has its own story, and Longborough’s is the most unexpected. Martin and Lizzie Graham were entranced by the Bayreuth centenary ‘Ring’, and conceived a crazy dream to replicate it in the Cotswolds.

They tested the water with chamber concerts in their drawing room, roped in a small touring opera company to perform on a temporary stage in a courtyard, built a 480-seater barn and filled it with discarded Covent Garden seats, and have now, after 20 years, made themselves a fixture in the operatic calendar. Next month they will stage Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’.

This season’s opening production was clearly designed to pull in the crowd and save money for ‘Siegfried’: everyone loves ‘Cosi fan tutte’, and it has a very small cast. Jenny Miller and her designer Jane Bruce have opted for the simplest of sets – six curtains, a plywood bar and sofa, and, instead of a backdrop, a huge screen carrying the surtitles – and they’ve placed it in the Fifties in what might just possibly be a cruise ship. It all feels very parish-hall.

Unfortunately, however, they have hired a choreographer whose style might also have come out of the Fifties, and who has an irresistible urge to keep the cast in constant motion: this is not the best way to let them honour the opera’s moments of sublimity. There are some nice ideas – Despina as the notary emerging from a multi-tiered cake like the assassin in ‘Some Like it Hot’ – but too often the body-language is just plain silly. Every director of ‘Cosi’ should have a ‘thesis’ for the denouement – how has the experience changed the characters? – but Miller patently has none.

Sasa Cano’s incarnation of the Mephistophelian fixer Don Alfonso is stiff, and his voice can descend to a stentorian bark, but the rest of the cast transcend the limits of the production so triumphantly that Mozart’s psychological drama emerges fresh and new. Rodney Clarke’s Gulielmo and Nicholas Watts’s Ferrando are gracefully sung and acted, and the women are outstanding: the rebelliousness and mischief of Martene Grimson’s Despina is deliciously infectious; Louise Callinan’s Dorabella is melodiously convincing, and Elizabeth Donovan brings tragic power to Fiordiligi’s noble dilemma. The other star of the evening is conductor Gianluca Marciano: if you didn’t know better, you’d say he was in charge of the Covent Garden band.