Le nozze di Figaro, The Mozartists, Page, Cadogan Hall review - cogency, intelligence and reverence

Ten years ago, Ian Page launched his and the Mozartists’ (then Classical Opera’s) remarkable endeavour to play music by WA Mozart 250 years after it was written, starting with a programme of material from 1765 by eight-year-old Mozart, and his contemporaries.

Page said at that moment: “When we play this music, I can bank on half the critics pointing out that it’s not as good as Figaro. But what matters is that Mozart could and would not have written Figaro had he not written these early pieces in the extraordinary way he did.”

The series will conclude in 2041, when the conductor will be 78 and many of us dependent on a broadcast relay to either the celestial or infernal hereafter; the next concert in the series will feature music from 1775. But with regard to Le Nozze di Figaro, cometh the hour. Out of nowhere, for the apparent sheer joy of it, this ensemble decided to give the perfect opera in a concert performance.

For a start, there’s something democratic about a world class ensemble of this standard performing Figaro thus. For 50 quid, one can see the whites of the singers’ eyes, cheek-by-jowl at a distance unaffordable in the major opera houses. My seat was in the far corner, adjacent to the wind section of the orchestra, able to watch Page face the musicians but with his back to the singers at whom he glanced, as though taking the lead from them, as well as his score. Throughout, Page (pictured below with some members of the cast) brought bounce, vim and vigour to the night – with tight focus but often flashing a broad smile too, at the sheer delight of it all, literally jumping up and down as Act Two reached its denouement. But Figaro is far more than commedia d’arte, well known as a revolutionary work, about the decadence of an aristocracy on which the clock was ticking in Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ France, when he wrote the play on which the opera is based. In that regard, the bass-baritone Antoin Herrera-López Kessel’s deep and captivating Figaro was more than poignant at the work’s domestic level: he was affirmative at its political one. The fact that Kessel is from the Caribbean – Cuban-born French – should make no difference to his presence on stage, but it does: the 1781 slave revolt in Haiti followed the premiere of Beaumarchais’ play by seven years, and Mozart’s opera by five. The French Revolution followed another eight years later. There’s severity and foreboding – fear and rage – from the start, even measuring out the nuptial quarters, with “Se vuol ballare, signor contino…”

Although both play and opera are named after Figaro, Susanna is the centre of gravity in Mozart’s incarnation. Sung tonight by a lambent Ellie Laugharne, from the start, with mischief, grace, the effervescence her character demands, but also the aplomb – a searing “Deh, vieni non tardar, o gioia bella” was perhaps the high point of the evening – that makes her the opera’s moral core. A role she shares with her mistress in the order of things about to be overthrown, but soul-sister in the causes of both play and opera: Countess Almaviva, innocent Rosina no longer, as she reminds her feckless husband, bitterly. Alexandra Lowe (pictured above) gave the role poignancy, but also gravitas and dignity, and her rendering of “Dove sono i bei momenti” reminded us, quite simply, that this is probably the most beautiful music ever written, that we cannot hear it too often, but also that like snowflakes, each is different from the others.

So this Figaro affirms the Mozartists as masters of both the entirely unfamiliar, and of work wherein we know every note – or think we do. Only a few weeks ago, they gave a concert of arias by Niccolò Jommelli, new to 90 per cent of the audience at Wigmore Hall. The music that night was a revelation for two important reasons among others, prescient of Mozart: Jommelli’s dramas were part of a moment and movement to make opera more adventurous than a mere sequence of recitative and arias; Page cited a manifesto calling for cohesion – and equality of roles – between the “poet”, the composer and “machinist”. And there was the matter of the orchestra: Jommelli’s scores were, said Page, “more of a presence in the narrative” than in opera hitherto, even in Handel. Foundation stones, if nothing else, for Mozart, Lorenzo da Ponte and their masterpiece, Figaro. What the Mozartists do better than anyone else is context. Which begs the question: is there anything new to do with, let alone say about, Mozart’s perfect opera? Well, yes: a work of genius at this level will always keep back a secret or two. Like the lovely flurries on lead violin during the beautiful comic chaos that follows Cherubino’s leap into the garden, and a host of other orchestral as well as vocal details. And another, related question: is there any advantage – apart from budget – in a concert performance? Yes again: one is reminded of rip-tides in the music, beneath the narrative, like the magnetism that does exist – at least it did here, both ways – between Susanna and the Count, in that most heart-melting duet of all: “Crudel! Perché finora”. She is supposed to be play-acting him, but the music suggests otherwise, subverting even the subversion of the plot, with flirtation as palpable as it is forbidden – Figaro’s jealousy not entirely misplaced. Mozart can be at his scary best when people are deceiving not only others, but themselves.

One overriding point: we can write all one want, to no particular avail, about marvellous conducting, singing and playing – all of which were plentiful tonight as they invariably are with this ensemble. But the way the Mozartists do things – and the real value of these performances that amount to a whole greater than the sum of their parts – is that they celebrate one person above all, in the raw, unveiled afresh with cogency, intelligence and reverence: bedazzling, astonishing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And last night in particular, that sense of Figaro as a tower of magnificent musical matchsticks, from which if one were removed the whole thing would collapse aground – but it doesn’t.

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