Lock up your local young operatic talent with no work and time to invent - and what do you get? Quarantine così is the answer from a group of Queensland-based artists. It's Mozart's Così fan tutte, re-invented for an audience living in the world of Covid19-enforced Zoom and Tik Tok. Same marvelous music - well, mostly Mozart, but (brilliantly) played on piano, with brisk dialog gluing the well known, and splendidly sung songs together. Same morally dubious story (until the end- spoiler alert). But how different is this?
Read all about it here, on their website. Check out the small production team here, and hear their accounts of the massive tasks they took on. You can view and listen here, episode by episode, as the remade opera unfolds.
The goal was simple: 'Every week our team of young artists will film and record their sections from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte separately in flats and houses scattered across the world. We then cut these recordings together to create a full scene from the opera to be released each week. By the end of this unprecedented crisis we may well have finished telling the story of the opera without ever physically seeing each other.' They did, and the website will take you to all 14 episodes. Limelight Mag described it as 'a triumph of pragmatism over perfectionism'.
But here's the thing. Take a classic opera like Così into an entirely new production context, with entirely new constraints and yes, opportunities - and you're taking the audience into the opera differently. During the months of free live-streaming from leading opera houses, we've been offered enough productions of Così to fill a week of bad dinner party arguments about Mozart and misogyny (if we ever get back to dinner parties). For starters, unlike most Così's, this 14-part version is genuinely, wonderfully, lol, funny!!!
It's also a dramatic deconstruction, since the filming (by handheld minimalist equipment) was necessarily episodic. Imagine an opera heavily cut into quick-film episodes and put back as a mosaic of musical moments imaged and reimagined in tiled rectangles on the screen. Rachel Pines, (Fiordiligi - in Berlin) told Limelight, “We filmed each episode in just a few days, and each cast member had one filming day. It meant no rehearsal time, except for some Zoom dialogue rehearsals. Any thoughts or ideas about the scene or characterisation usually didn’t get discussed until the day before, or during the filming itself. And because of the time difference I often wasn’t able to see the other cast members’ footage until each episode was released. So I had to imagine everything that was happening, and trust Chris to put it all together.” He did - and of course it's totally different from any of the versions you've ever seen.
And it's about the issues of intimacy and isolation that surround the Covid experience. If you're not yet drawn in to watching the whole, visit with episode 3 here: The Lads Join the Army. Mozart's music winds around the loneliness and fear, in the famous quintet as the boys fake their departure.
Left alone, with only the scheming Don Alfonso, the women pray for safety for these cads in the lovely trio, "Soave il vento". Here's that trio from the Met's famous megabucks 'Coney Island' production, live streamed last week. It's different of course in quarantine così - and not just because a piano replaces the splendid Met orchestra. These young women are further isolated in their on-screen boxes. Director Chris NcNee, telling the story of this spunky project here, stresses its relevance for 'the Coronavirus moment', concluding about the opera that 'zoomed out from socially isolated staging it can become about our shared hope that the mini tragedies of quarantine will end, and we'll return to intimacy and touch'.
Indeed, grant our desires!
And meanwhile, if you enjoyed this cheeky and clever celebration of Così and admired the young cast's professionalism, energy and talent at a time when artists are not only isolated but out of work, you can donate to their effort here.
PS What is it about Così? The Finnish Opera created their own pandemic opera satire as Covid fan tutte. It's live on Opera Vision now: click here to watch. The opera 'satirically revisits Mozart's classic opera by adapting its storyline to reflect Finland's experience during the coronavirus crisis... lightheartedly follows ordinary Finns’ lives amid press conferences by the government and pandemic experts.'
Lyn, 23 October, 2020