Opera on a budget

I went to see “The Opera Project’s”:http://www.nowt2do.co.uk/TPreview_TobAut_Cosi.htm production of Cosi Fan Tutte last night at Bristol’s “Tobacco Factory”:http://www.tobaccofactory.com/theatre.htm . I wasn’t sure quite what to expect, since my previous experience of the venue had been for the excellent “Shakespeare”:http://www.shakespeareatthetobaccofactory.co.uk/ productions there, rather than for anything musical. The theatre is very small and the audience entirely surrounds the “stage”. Anyway, it worked marvellously. Musically, of course, it wasn’t going to be on a par with Covent Garden or the Met since only a very small orchestra could possibly fit in the space. But dramatically it was tremendous with the players in very immediate contact with the audience. The singing was pretty good, but Richard Studer’s very colloquial English translation of the libretto — “You’re winding me up!” etc — and the unfussiness of the production made for a very engaging evening.

Cosi probably isn’t my favourite of the Mozart operas. But it tells us something about the greatness of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s artistry that they produced something that can succeed in performance in so many different ways and in different productions. Given the right orchestra you could just close your eyes and enjoy the richness of the music, a lavish production from a great opera company can work as a spectacle, and a small-scale budget performance can work as an Oscar Wilde-style comedy.

Given that diversity of possibilities with just one work (and, of course, they aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities) it puzzles me when people say that don’t like opera. (And add to the variations on one work, the different musical styles available!) I can spend an evening amused and engaged by a performance like the one I saw at the Tobacco Factory, or I can put on a CD of Maria Callas or Renata Tebaldi and have the whole world magically become calm and still.

Incidentally, the “Tobacco Factory”:http://www.tobaccofactory.com/intro.htm is a development by “George Ferguson”:http://www.riba.org/go/RIBA/News/Press_37.html , one of Bristol’s leading architects and the current president of “RIBA”:http://www.riba.org/ . He’s a real visionary (and a leading British exponent of new urbanism). The theatre he’s designed there runs at a slight loss, I understand, but it adds value to the whole complex which in turn helps to enliven what was a fairly run-down part of the city.