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Sovereign Quality
Aidan Lang's 'The Marriage of Figaro',
recommended by HOWARD SMITH
Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, the first presentation of NBR New Zealand Opera's 2010 season [seen 22 May 2010 at St James Theatre, Wellington], offered comedic staging, modernistic vertical sets and wonderfully expressive singing; all in all a gorgeous, irrepressible production.
Regular opera-goers may justifiably have believed the company would be hard put to overshadow such recent productions as Janácek's powerful, grisly Jenufa and Rossini's zany, sunlit Italian Girl in Algiers. But not so.
The combination of neo-period costumes (designed by Elizabeth Whiting) and a set (designed by Robin Rawstorne) that brought to mind Le Corbusier combined to lend the Mozart/da Ponte opera buffa a degree of verisimilitude which is rarely achieved.
Whiting's costumes effectively spanned the (eighteenth to twenty first) centuries; especially via the arresting denim-clad Chapman Tripp Chorus...
Copyright © 30 May 2010
Howard Smith,
Masterton, New Zealand
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