Salzburg.(International)(Opera Review)

Cosi Fan Tutte, Mozart's frothy, sophisticated take on love among the Neapolitan upper class, is traditionally seen as a hilarious spoof of mock infidelity. Not so this spring at Salzburg's Easter Festival, where Ursel and Karl-Heinz Herrmann (holdovers from the previous Gerard Mortier regime) presented the darker side of a normally robust comic opera. With Simon Rattle leading two-thirds of the Berlin Philharmonic in the pit, and the un-Mozartean expanse of a sixty-foot-wide Grosses Festspielhaus stage, this enthralling fable of two couples who change partners--and may or may not have second thoughts about their actions at the end of the opera--became a strategic exercise in character placement and the use of minimal props on a vast playing field. (Since the directors of Salzburg's Easter and Summer Festivals are now talking to each other, this new Cosi will be repeated in August with a largely new cast of principals, a new conductor, Philippe Jordan, and a new orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic.)

The Grosses Festspielhaus stage was surrounded (and made slightly smaller) by a broad black frame. Outside it, hanging high on the left, was a large white feather; on the right, hanging fairly low, was a large grey egg. (When, at the end of the opera, the feather came down and the egg went up, there was considerable confusion about what the directors had in mind.) The girls changed clothes several times behind a second, larger egg that was placed to the right of the stage proper; nearby was a gleaming black piano, with a pianist who played the recitatives. Don Alfonso--the slightly satanic nobleman played with superb command by veteran Thomas Allen, who will repeat his performance this summer--had a small bar at the far left, and a mixed chorus in evening dress compressed into a tight block to march back and forth in celebration of "la bella vita militar."

Musically, this Cosi was a brilliant, hard-edged gem. Rattle conducted a frisky, ...