Poor Mozart. Everyone does it, but very badly.

Judges

The La Scala season, which opened with a bang with La Forza del Destino, closes in a minor key with Mozart's Così fan tutte. A supreme masterpiece, but incredibly difficult to stage: everyone was hoping for Robert Carsen, who proved himself to be the great director he always was, but was less convincing than ever. Carsen transforms the Enlightenment idea (the Enlightenment is very different from Romanticism, which, in fact, never understood Mozart) of a teaching on the meaning of love, based more on Reason, which endures, than on Passion, always fleeting and often fallacious, into a reality TV show. A great display of glitz and glamour, a display of supreme technical virtuosity in a highly self-referential, rather flattering, and ultimately—shall we say the horrible word?—banal direction, made worse by the gross disregard for the problems posed by the unfortunate acoustics of a stage on which the fly tower acts as a chimney for the voices. If a stage set on a revolving stage already requires it to be significantly rearward, placing everyone at the back and top for long minutes simply causes the singing to disappear. Thus, the cast , already extremely weak (typical of the previous superintendent, who failed two out of three in five years), was made up of ectoplasms. Sandrine Piau was terrible, a mosquito in her youth, let alone now and in this condition, with her Ostrogothic diction; Gerald Finley is a great artist, but when the voice is gone, retirement is sometimes a must. Giovanni Sala had already amply demonstrated his serious technical shortcomings, and he was entrusted with a challenging role like Ferrando. Fiordiligi (Elsa Dreisig) and Dorabella (Nina Van Essen) were a little better, but still with voices and phrasing worthy of a third cast. Luca Micheletti did much better in Mozart than in Verdi, but only because of the law of the monocle in terra caecorum. Alexander Soddy, a relatively young but extremely gifted conductor, performed well, but less than expected: brisk tempos, attention to detail, extremely clean orchestration, but… Shall we use the horrible word for him too? A bit superficial for Mozart, this Mozart at that.