The men who were recklessly curious

Anyone who attended the Staatsoper’s new Figaro – which had its first public performances a few weeks earlier in mid-September – would be forgiven for approaching this new production of Così fan tutte with some trepidation; the director of both productions, Vincent Huguet, had managed the nearly impossible task of draining the vitality from Figaro, and one dreaded to think what might happen to an opera in which so much depends on nuance, grace and a delicate sense of balance. The evening, however, was an absolute delight. Although the staging suffered from a lack of dramatic thrust, its shortcomings seemed insignificant when set against the quality of the music, which included some of the finest Mozart singing to appear on any Berlin stage in recent memory. Between a superb ensemble cast and Daniel Barenboim’s perfectly-judged musical…