by Mike Telin & Daniel Hathaway
Mozart’s La finta giardiniera is an ideal teaching opera for young singers, with its wealth of approachable arias and challenging recitatives. It also boasts a plot so complicated that few have been able to sum it up in a paragraph. “I could not make this opera stranger than it already is,” director Jonathon Field said in a telephone conversation. Tenor Daniel McGrew, who sings the role of the Count, said, “It takes a long time just to get to know what it is about.”
Soprano Rebecca Achtenberg, who plays Sandrina, read four different synopses before she auditioned. “The plot is complicated and I have relished developing ways of explaining it as quickly as possible. But I think if you take out all of the side plots it is pretty simple: girl gets stabbed by her lover, girl goes off to find him, a lot of mistaken identity, a lot of love triangles, and finally, everybody ends up with the person they should. Of course, the intricacies are important to the fun, but I think the plot clears up as the characters develop throughout the opera.” [Read more…]
