Le nozze di Figaro at Salzburg Festival — brutal but brilliant

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Count Almaviva is a mafia boss, Figaro one of his henchmen. Bartolo is a crooked cleric with a heroin habit, also on his payroll. In this hard-drinking, drug-addicted milieu, only Cherubino is sober; poetry is his drug of choice. And everyone is in lust with him.

Martin Kušej’s new Figaro for the Salzburg Festival is slick, dark and grimly entertaining. The set, by Raimund Orfeo Voigt, is a faceless concrete bunker — part luxury penthouse, part underground car park, part boarding school bathroom. Antonio’s garden is a rubbish chute. That the Count is a murderer and a rapist would probably have been clear without the addition of a blood-smeared chorus of white-clad girls, but Kušej wouldn’t be Kušej without a bit of extra gore. Susanna is clearly attracted to him despite his evil tendencies; and of course, the Countess knows.

In the end, although everyone has a gun, this is a fairly conventional Figaro. By the fourth act, Kušej seems to have run out of ideas, and lets his characters crawl through beds of rushes as the libretto dictates, with no suggestion of why the implausible costume swap between the women should work. The audience boos anyway.

Kušej’s handiwork is meticulous, though, and his characters live and breathe. More than this, everything breathes with the music. Raphaël Pichon drives the Vienna Philharmonic far from its comfort zone, away from cushioned and syrupy sound and into the world of crisp, hard-edged classicism — brisk, taut and wide awake. Kušej’s staging is musical, Pichon’s conducting theatrical; the two work together to a degree that is far more rare than it should be. Every detail has been carefully thought through, and the symbiosis is breathtaking.

When Lea Desandre’s Cherubino sings, the Countess and Susanna fall in love with the sheer beauty of sound; so do we. Desandre’s young lover is neither cute nor childish; (s)he is gamine, androgynous and superlatively seductive. At last, we can believe the extent of the Count’s jealousy.

The singing is uniformly superlative. Sabine Devieilhe’s Susanna is knowing, clever and capable of stopping time with the purity of her upper register. Krzysztof Baçzyk is a big, dangerous Figaro, wry and thuggish yet utterly likeable. Andrè Schuen is suave and deadly as Almaviva; Adriana González has tragic stature as the neglected Countess. All the voices are sonorous, well-balanced, nuanced and clean, and recapitulations are discreetly and tastefully ornamented. Listening is bliss.

This is a Figaro without any major revelations, but it is very, very well-made.

★★★★☆

To August 28, salzburgerfestspiele.at