Così Fan Tutte

Longborough Festival Opera’s new production of Così Fan Tutte is not so much ’for reduced forces’ as it is radically, rewardingly reinvented.

Performed in-the-round in LFO’s circus-red Big Top, conductor Lesley Anne Sammons’ arrangement of Mozart’s score – played with flair by the six-piece Barefoot Band – adds dulcet recorders to sensuous clarinet, injects an accordion’s brassy punch, and complements double bass with electric strum. Classical purism it is not; classy panache it certainly is.

It feels perfectly natural when a saucy spit-and-polish routine by Despina (Lizzie Holmes) takes a tango twist, or genial Don Alfonso (John Molloy) invites the heart-crossed lovers to a fancy-dress disco, with karaoke serenading and glitterball glamour (lighting by Tim Mitchell).

Director Sam Brown and designer Naomi Kuyck Cohen locate the four bright young things" amid Palladian statuary in an anytime world of permanent partying. Champagne is on tap, and the living is high. Army kit, Domestos bottles and razor-sharp stilettos are flung about; lovers are, literally, placed on pedestals.

The women enter the dupe with eyes wide open. Anna Patalong’s Fiordiligi wrestles with her conscience, but Come Scoglio is more come-on than clear-off. Easy-going Dorabella (Idunnu Münch) slips off her farthingale to reveal Wonder Woman boots. The hapless "Albanians" – William Morgan’s Ferrando a hulking green centurion, Marcus Farnsworth’s Guglielmo a tail-wagging scarlet Satan – stand no chance.

But the diction-crisp quartet blends harmoniously and by the end, tossing aside the classical busts they have so foolishly worshipped, they realise that Alfonso was right: you love who you love.