Barrie Kosky’s Così fan tutte is a filmed and recorded production of Mozart’s opera from the Vienna State Opera, captured in 2024–26 with Philippe Jordan conducting and later issued on audio/video formats. In this staging, Kosky completes his Da Ponte cycle (following new productions of Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni) by presenting Così fan tutte as a play‑within‑a‑play: Don Alfonso, sung by Christopher Maltman, is reimagined as an aging theatre director who rehearses a mysterious, emotionally charged stage work with four young actors—Fiordiligi (Federica Lombardi), Dorabella (Emily D’Angelo), Ferrando (Filipe Manu), and Guglielmo (Peter Kellner)—while Despina (Kate Lindsey) acts as their stage manager and co‑conspirator. The orchestral forces are slightly reduced and positioned for a “historically informed” sound, with Jordan leading from the fortepiano and emphasizing what Kosky calls the opera’s “musical economy,” its distilled late‑Mozart clarity where not a note feels superfluous.Conceptually, Kosky’s production treats Così fan tutte as a black comedy about performance, identity, and the slippery boundary between acted and real emotions. By placing the action in a rehearsal room and making the couples a troupe of actors, the familiar plot—a fidelity bet and a game of disguise that gradually destabilizes everyone’s certainties—becomes a study of “method acting” in love: characters start and stop feelings on command until they can no longer control where performance ends and genuine desire begins. Critics note that the production’s constant motion, layered humour, and sometimes heightened theatricality push the opera toward emotional abstraction, yet the musical execution remains grounded in ensemble cohesion and classical beauty. In audio and video release form, Kosky’s Così fan tutte thus offers both a vivid, contemporary interpretive lens on Mozart’s dramma giocoso and a document of a major European house’s attempt to rethink the Da Ponte trilogy as a coherent, modern theatrical cycle.
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