'The Secret World Of Fantasies' by Kevin Shopland

Two very different expressions of musical eroticism will be performed this week, the one Rococo, the other Romantic. Mozart’s sophisticated erotic comic opera Cosi fan tutte will be given by the Budapest Festival Orchestra and singers Andrea Rost, Anke Vondung, Tassis Christoyannis, Topi Lehtipuu, Claire Ormshaw and William Shimell, conducted by Iván Fischer, on November 30 and December 2 and 4.
 
Rimsky-Korsakov’s four-movement symphonic poem Sheherezade will be performed in Iván Markó’s new choreography with Mónika Misáczi in the title role in the November 29 premier. All performances will be at the Palace of Arts.Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) often turned to orientalism, exoticism and fairy tales for thematic material in his operas and other compositions. In Shehere­zade he not only penetrated the exotic fairy-tale world of the Arabian Nights, but also the erotic world of the harem, a theme central to erotic art of the late Classic and Romantic periods. 

The harem slave girl Sheherezade will be spared death as long as she can tell stories to entertain the pasha. So she tells a cliff-hanger every night, thus gaining time. Rimsky-Korsakov gives the role of beautiful, erotic female narrator to the solo violin, which stands out in a recurring solo motif that joins the various tales, which are told by the full orchestra.

In Iván Markó’s choreography, the story begins in the present and then flashes back to the past, to a fairy-tale world, before returning, so that our own time is illuminated. A lonely woman returns from a ball and experiences Sheherezade’s erotic and dramatic story while in an alcoholic stupor. She imagines two types of men: one, a leader personified by power, riches and violence; the other a gold slave personified by kindness and emotional maturity, but also servitude.
 
The slave Sheherezade wants to escape the harem to the freedom of love and incites a rebellion among her harem companions against tyranny, with dramatic consequences. The dreaming woman awakes to experience the beauties and dangers of erotic desire.In this ballet, which is only for people over the age of 16, the male roles of the Leader and the Gold Slave are danced by István Issovits and Gábor Nyári, respectively. 

The performance will be in the Festival Theater and is paired with another ballet called The Message of Angels, to music by J.S. Bach.Mozart’s opera is an altogether different brand of eroticism. It doesn’t give sway to the lush surges of Romantic orchestral color that characterize Rimsky’s work. 

Cosi fan tutte (loosely translated, “All women are like that”) deals with the theme of the impossibility of fidelity in love. An old philosopher makes a bet with two young grooms-to-be that their fiancées can be seduced and will be unfaithful to them. The young men don’t believe him and agree to a silly scheme to put the women to the test. Eventually the women succumb (to each other’s lover, creating a kind of wife-swapping situation), only to have everything rightened at the end.
Or is it? 

While on the surface there seems to be a happy, comic, non-serious ending, in reality there is a deep sadness that the couples will try to go back to the way they were before all the subterfuge, seduction, deception and betrayal. All a silly game? Hardly. There is no hope for true happiness and faithfulness between man and woman, seems to be the subtext of this late Mozart opera, a hard moral that Mozart must have felt in his bones, as he was quite probably unfaithful to his wife just around the time of writing Cosi in 1789.

The deeper ramifications may be dark, but the music is bubbly and sparkling like champagne and contains some of Mozart’s loveliest and most erotic vocal writing. And we can expect the finest interpretation of this opera from Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which has just been designated by Classical music tastemaker journal Gramophone as one of the ten best orchestras in the world.

The staged opera, adapted from Britain’s 2006 Glyndebourne Opera Festival by Samantha Potter and directed by Nicholas Hytner, features excellent singers.

Mozart: Cosi fan tutte
Rost, Vondung, Shimell, etc.
Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer
Nov 30, Dec 2 & 4, 7pm

Rimsky-Korsakov:
Sheherezade
Markó, choreographer
Nov 29, Dec 1 & 2, 7pm
Palace of Arts"

Source: Budapest Sun