Looking every inch the prima donna with what seemed like the entire contents of Hatton Garden dangling from her earlobes, the British soprano Louise Alder was the centrepiece of this all-Mozart concert from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Happily, her voice sparkled as much as her jewellery.
This was one of those concerts in which famous operatic arias are ripped out of their dramatic context and presented like a succession of circus acts. When you also get three overtures severed from their operas, and not always followed by arias from the same work, you do feel that you’ve stumbled into a surreal world where Don Giovanni is about to seduce Fiordiligi and drag Cherubino down to hell with him.
But all credit to Alder. After a slightly under-characterised and play-safe first half — Dove sono was immaculate but never heart-rending — she was much more animated after the interval. Voi che sapete had a properly boyish mischievousness and the standalone showpiece Bella mia fiamma, addio! was brilliantly delivered.
Its text is one of those suicidal-lover howls in which the poet revels in 50 shades of misery, all evoked by Mozart in music that veers from rage and despair to glum resignation and back again. Alder captured it all, with lustrous tone in the lower register, dazzling embellishments in the ledger lines, pinpoint-accurate coloratura, good intonation in the testing chromatic passages and, where needed, thrilling power.
All this, and especially the tricky accompanied recitatives, was conducted persuasively by Riccardo Minasi, whose Mozart credentials were first flourished in the UK when he presided over Così fan tutte (also with the OAE) at Glyndebourne in 2021. Not only does he have a clever way of holding back phrases where the music seems to take on a questioning or wistful tone, but he also brings the orchestral textures alive with deft accents and by highlighting often hidden inner lines. Those imaginative touches were evident in a performance of Symphony No 31 that delighted from start to finish, even where Minasi ignored the first rule of Mozart conducting: never encourage the timpanist.
★★★★☆
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