The Marriage of Figaro review – revival sparkles with young cast

The new Royal Opera season opens with a revival, the production’s 10th, of David McVicar’s 2006 staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, conducted by Julia Jones. As on many previous occasions, McVicar has rethought and reworked it, carefully moulding it to his new cast, and subtly shifting points of emphasis. Huw Montague Rendall’s Count, attractive if predatory, is more insistently sexual, less prone to violence than some of his predecessors. We’re also more aware here than in the past of the Countess’s (Maria Bengtsson) attraction, albeit unacknowledged, to Cherubino (Ginger Costa-Jackson). Bartolo (Peter Kálmán) and Marcellina (Rebecca Evans) are now finely rounded characters, funny without resorting to caricature. And you’re more conscious of the rest of the Almaviva household, the servants and retainers, observing, reacting to and indeed, on occasion, participating in the central action: just occasionally, though, it now also seems fractionally too busy as a result.
There are some superb individual performances. Figaro and Susanna are played by Luca Micheletti and Chinese soprano Ying Fang. He is handsome, warm-voiced, morally aware and prone to anger, squaring off with tremendous dignity against Montague Rendall’s Count, who seems tellingly afraid at times of this man he is contemptuously lording it over. Fang, making her Covent Garden debut, is a curiously reflective Susanna, less immediately spirited than some, but the voice is lovely and Deh Vieni Non Tardar sounds exquisite in its sensual poise. Her silky tone is at times not unlike Bengtsson’s, so the subterfuges and mistaken identities of the final scenes seem entirely credible.
Bengtsson, a great artist, meanwhile, lays bare the Countess’s anguish of soul with understated intensity, and is meltingly beautiful at the end as she forgives her husband. Rapidly emerging as one of today’s finest baritones, Montague Rendall is real stage animal, who combines patrician finesse with dramatic fire. Costa-Jackson makes an appealing Cherubino, Evans’s Marcellina hides a touching vulnerability beneath all that brittle bravado, and Kálmán sounds really imposing in his vengeance aria.
Jones conducts with fierce energy and drive, but could on occasion hold back more. Dove Sono, for instance, propelled urgently forward rather than nostalgically reflective, feels fractionally too fast. The orchestra is on occasion slightly too prominent, sometimes obscuring the voices, but the playing is consistently fine, and Jones is right to place the emphasis on Mozart’s often extraordinary powers of orchestration.