It’s something of a miracle that this production of Così fan tutte took place at all … but then, it was going to take a lot more than a global pandemic to stop Helga Rabl-Stadler (festival president) from salvaging the Salzburg Festival’s centenary season. With a rigorous testing regime and socially distanced audiences, the festival was permitted to go ahead, and featured two opera productions – a new Elektra in the Felsenreitschule and this unscheduled Così in the Grosses Festspielhaus. Although created in a matter of weeks, marketing around this DVD release is a little coy of mentioning that Christof Loy’s production was very heavily based on his 2008 staging at Oper Frankfurt, where Despina (perhaps in Covid-anticipation) wears a face mask when disguised as the doctor.

In many ways, Loy is the ideal director for the Covid era. He favours white-box uni-sets, cuts out clutter and homes in on the relationships between his characters. He and conductor Joana Mallwitz (making her festival debut) also trimmed the score – mostly of recitatives, although a couple of arias are excised too – in order to remove the need for an interval. Mallwitz noted that the ever-practical Mozart would surely have done the same.

What we’re left with is a taut account (running time 146 minutes) where the action whistles along. Loy takes a serious view of the plot – no dramma giocoso this – where the only laughs arise out of misunderstandings. He focuses on the opera’s subtitle, La scuola degli amanti (‘The School for Lovers’), which was Lorenzo da Ponte’s preferred choice of title. His Don Alfonso – Johannes Martin Kränzle, who also sang the role when Loy created his production in Frankfurt – is no cynic but a philosopher who initially sets out to prove a point … and is distraught when his plan actually works. Kränzle’s Alfonso is visibly moved when Ferrando (excellent tenor Bogdan Volkov) sings ‘Un’aura amorosa’ and he grows more melancholy as his plot unfolds. As with the best of Alfonsos, you wonder what past relationships have led him to this point. Here, every character is a casualty of this manipulator-in-chief.

The one (the only) upside to the pandemic was that all Loy’s first choice of singers were available to come to Salzburg. It’s frankly difficult to imagine a better-cast Così today. Elsa Dreisig sings the treacherously difficult role of Fiordiligi superbly, with pearly top notes and rock-solid technique in ‘Come scoglio’, while French mezzo Marianne Crebassa is a delicious Dorabella, beautifully characterised if a bit less ‘flighty’ than usual. In her role debut, Lea Desandre is a spunky Despina, bright and brisk, though she too is hit hard by the revelations at the end. Volkov is an experienced Ferrando (I recall a fine showing for the Glyndebourne Tour) and is the more sensitive of the male lovers, easily wounded in matters of the heart. Andrè Schuen is the mellifluous Guglielmo, if a little stiff acting-wise.

Mallwitz really makes Mozart’s score zing, keeping the Vienna Philharmonic light on their toes. I’ve been super-impressed with her conducting in a number of lockdown streams during the past year. Currently music director at Staatstheater Nürnberg, she is certainly one to watch.