Reviewed by James Karas
On October 3, 2026, the Metropolitan Opera of New York launched its 20th season of Live in HD transmissions to movie theatres around the world with a production of Cosi Fan Tutte. On the same day the Canadian Opera Company premiered this year’s production of the same opera in a revival of Atom Egoyan’s 2019 reading. That left me with no choice but to see both productions on the same day. The Cosi from the Met is a revival of Phelim McDermott’s 2018 production.
MET PRODUCTION LIVE FROM NEW YORK
McDermott produced a highly imaginative Cosi by setting it on Coney Island, New York, in the 1950’s.
Coney Island is famous for its beaches and amusement parks and it is as much a legend as it is a real destination for people seeking a place in the sun and the pleasures of a circus. McDermott makes full use of the reputation of Coney Isand and marries it to Mozart’s opera lovers.
During the overture a large box is opened and colourful people emerge from it. Little people, big people, people carrying signs, characters in gaudy costumes, in fact a whole circus jumps out. That is not all. There is a snake charmer with a real boa constrictor, a fire eater, two sword swallowers, a fortune teller, a contortionist and other acts that may have slipped my mind. They all actually perform and the set resembles very much the fairground of a beach town where circus performers play an important part.
McDermott grafts the opera onto this setting quite expertly and my complaint is that the circus performers were so good that I tended to be drawn into their activities instead of watching the actual opera performance.
In addition to the
Coney Island set, we see the interior and exterior of the Skyline Hotel. Tom
Pye’s set design is very versatile and, for example, the panel showing an interior is turned around
and we get an exterior. Very good stuff.
Federica Lombardi as Fiordiligi. Photo © Marty Sohl | Met Opera
Don Alfonso (Gerald Finley) is sitting at a café with two smartly dressed naval officers, Ferrando (Duke Kim) and Guglielmo (Andrey Zhilikhovsky). The men protest that their fiancées, Fiordiligi (Federica Lombardi) and Dorabella (Samantha Hankey) are beautiful and virtuous and faithful sisters until death. Alfonso replies “BS” in polite Italian and he bets that all women are like that. The naval officers will go away and be replaced by two Albanians (never mind how – this is opera) and attempt to seduce the girls. Now you know what will happen in the next two and a half hours of sumptuous music, beautiful songs leading to the inevitable.
The cynical Alfonso is sung by British baritone Gerald Finley who does superb vocal work and plots the assault on the two ladies with the help of the maid Despina sung by Puerto Rican soprano Ana Maria Martinez. At 53, she still does an energetic and funny Despina and she has two other roles. She sings and overacts hilariously as Dr. Magnetico who comes to cure the men from the poison that they are supposed to have taken. Near the end she appears as a Notary to wed the two couples and she is hilarious again. Despina is a juicy role and Martinez does fine work.
The ardent lovers as naval officers or Albanians are Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky as Guglielmo and American tenor Duke Kim as Ferrando. They are lovable, passionate. ridiculous and funny as they are rebuffed by their targets. Remember Guglielmo is engaged to Fiordiligi but when he changes identity he pursues Dorabella and vice versa.
Sara Erde as Revival Director brings Phelim McDermott’s production to full and varied life in all its bravura and wild imagination. Nimrod David Pfeffer conducts the Met Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a lively and wonderful performance
THE CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY AND ATOM EGOYAN
Several hours after seeing the Met’s production. I saw the COC’s revival of Atom Egoyan’s production. The two productions give us Mozart’s fabulous music, arias, ensembles and humour. But they are worlds apart.
The first thing you see on the stage when you take your seat in The Four Seasons Centre is Frida Kahlo’s Two Fridas. What does that painting have to do with Mozart’s great comic opera? What is Egoyan telling us?
Egoyan and Set and Costume Designer Debra Hanson set the opera in a private school where the four lovers are students and Don Alfonso is a professor. The set has a large and prominent display case at the back, several tables on stage and a lectern. Fiordiligi and Dorabella wear white blazers and short skirts looking like attractive students. There are paintings of butterflies all over and we see people with huge nets trying to catch live butterflies. I am not sure what the school teaches.
Egoyan wants us to laugh and he adds comic touches including giving the less serious sister Dorabella (mezzo soprano Martina Myskohlid) a penchant for fainting or just falling. Despina (soprano Tracy Dalh) is a spitfire of energy and vocal atrocities as the doctor and the notary and a comic character in general. Well delivered comedy from both.
Photo: Michael Cooper
But the comic is blended with the serious where the two sisters who are passionately in love, Fiordiligi (Lauren Fagan) with Guglielmo (baritone Joel Allison) and Dorabella with Ferrando (tenor Laurence Kilsby), face the moral dilemma of being unfaithful to them. Their lovers disguised as Albanians mount serious assaults on their fidelity including feigning illness and possible death. Dorabella’s fidelity crumbles but Fiordiligi holds on longer until she too succumbs.
Guglielmo’s and Ferrando’s faith in the steadfastness of their lovers is put to the test by a wager with the old bachelor Don Alfonso (Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch).
The music, the arias, from solo to duets, quartets, quintets, sextets and choruses are of surpassing beauty and they are performed gorgeously. The performances are not all equally successful but I do not want to be churlish about a performance that I thoroughly enjoyed. The Canadian Opera Company Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Johannes Debus was superb,
Kudos to Atom Egoyan for the outstanding work in staging this opera. But what is Kahlo’s The Two Fridas looking at us during the second act in the place of the display case?
The painting shows two different Fridas. One shows her dressed in a traditional costume and the other in a modern dress. We see the heart of Frida in both portraits. In the modern dress side, the heart is cut and torn and we see a vein going to her lap where it is cut and bleeding on her dress. In the traditional portrait her heart is intact but a vein connects both portraits.
What is Egoyan telling us? I am stumped. Are the two Fridas a portrait of Fiordiligi and Dorabella? And how does Cosi Fan Tutte end? In the beginning Fiordiligi loves Guglielmo and Dorabella love Ferrando. During the opera they succumb to the lover of her sister. In the end do they go to their original fiancées or to the other one, the Albanian? That is the ambiguous end of the opera and Egoyan may be giving us a modern teaser lest we jump too easily to the “wrong” conclusion.
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Cosi Fan Tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte was transmitted Live in HD on October 3, 2026 at various Cineplex theatres across Canada. For more information and reprises go to: www.cineplex.com/events
Cosi Fan Tutte by Mozart opened on October 3 and will be performed a total of seven times until October 18, 2026, at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario. www.coc.ca
