London. (International).

During the Victorian era, Cosi Fan Tutte was hardly ever performed, due to its supposedly deplorable frivolity. Throughout the twentieth century, it was performed more and more, becoming (as Alice in Wonderland might have said) seriouser and seriouser. Nowadays some directors scarcely seem to regard it as a comic opera at all. If Matthew Warchus's new production for ENO (May 29) let the Neapolitan skies cloud over too soon, at least he allowed some fun to happen before the rain started. However, Laura Hopkins's designs did not depict eighteenth-century Naples: the costumes were late 1930s-40s, the remaining visuals inspired by the surrealist works of Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux.

These handsome, dreamlike settings, with pinks and browns to the fore, were pleasing to look upon, and the frame they established at least allowed one to concentrate on the strange emotional games set up in da Ponte's text and Mozart's music. But the balance tipped too far and too early in the direction of the work's tragic potential. Predictably, the final ensemble, which is surely intended as an epilogue (suggesting that we'd be happier if we took ourselves and our feelings less seriously), instead showed the wounded hearts and broken trust to which the games inevitably have led. In the final visual gesture, when Andrew Shore's Don Alfonso handed over to Janis Kelly's Despina the money she'd earned aiding him in his nefarious schemes, she spat at him.

Musically this was a show with many positives, none greater than Mark Wigglesworth's conducting. His is not an authenticist's Mozart, but it is alert and alive in every bar nevertheless. The tempos all worked, and there was some marvelous highlighting of orchestral detail. His relative inexperience in the pit showed in a few moments of wavery ensemble, but his talent is as great as his insight. However, he should not have allowed Warchus to get rid of the chorus. Mozart clearly didn't consider the chorus redundant, and at the point when the words as well as the music of "Bella vita militar" should alert Dorabella and Fiordiligi to the disaster about to befall them, it was far from clear what so exercised them.

The casting of the women suffered from too great a similarity of vocal tone--all three are essentially light sopranos. But Susan Gritton was an attentive Fiordiligi, Mary Plazas an energetic Dorabella, while Kelly offered a tart, impeccably stage-crafted Despina. The men were less even. Toby Spence's thin-toned, angular Ferrando became wearing, while as Guglielmo, Christopher Maltman--one of the company's finest young baritones--has developed a bad habit of singing around the notes rather than on them, presumably aiming for dramatic effect. Shore, in the seemingly more buffo role of Alfonso, sang what was written, to far greater effect, thereby proving that the ...