From So do all of them, we salute the incomparable musical genius while sometimes criticizing the plot for too much lightness and implausibility. How to believe in fact that two young women do not recognize their fiancés, on the pretext that they have disguised themselves as “Turks or Wallachians” ? How to admit, that in the space of a day, they let themselves be seduced by these so-called foreigners?
These breaches of credibility – of which the theater is not stingy – opens up a reflection on the way in which the truth of feelings can be fully inscribed in an argument that ignores logic. Nice idea then of Laurent Pelly, who places his staging in a studio where a team of six singers, surrounded by busy technicians and sound engineers, records the opera created in Vienna by Mozart in 1790.
The spectator quickly understands that the artists will let themselves be taken in the dramatic and musical game, identify with their roles, forget about microphones, desks and scores, to experience comic misunderstandings and heartbreaking torments in music. But why does this ingenious device turn short instead of unfolding? As if the director remained on the edge of his project rather than accomplishing it. Admittedly, the performers mobilize all their talent as actors and their physical charm to liven up the set, but the proposal could have gone so much further.
time is suspended
Emmanuelle Haïm, she leads the Mozart line to infinity, finding its apotheosis in the countless ensembles that lead you from delight to emotion, from smiling in a state of weightlessness. After the first, we can imagine that the few roughnesses and inaccuracies of the instrumentalists of the Concert d’Astrée will fade away.
On the set, Vannina Santoni, sensitive and bright Fiordiligi, finds her double ideal in Cyrille Dubois, accustomed to the role of Ferrando: that of poetry in the half-tones never affected, of a confusing natural. The duo that brings together – finally, but so briefly – the two characters is one of the most ineffable pages of the work, of these moments of indefinable grace, of suspended time.
The Dorabella-Guglielmo couple also deserve all the praise, even if Gaëlle Arquez gives her sumptuous voice a little too much control. At his side, Florian Sempey portrays a boy more boiling than subtle, suddenly devastated by the betrayal of his beautiful. Pulling the strings of these sublime puppets, Laurent Naouri (Alfonso) compensates for a blunt timbre with impeccable theatrical science; Laurène Paternò’s cheeky Despina supports him brilliantly, particularly at ease in the episodes where she disguises herself as a doctor and then as a notary. More fake, more real than ever!