Comico

"It begins startlingly: brisk, staccato, pistol-shot chords, and the oboe is off at a fashionably rapid pace which is arrested at the orchestral statement ‘Cosi fan tutte’: and then the Presto, at a tempo that tests the agility of the woodwind (and does not find it wanting). This is not, in short, a conventional performance, either of the traditional or the ‘period-instrument’ type. Rene Jacobs tends to make the fast music faster than usual and the slow slower. Several numbers emerge with a real brilliance of sound and execution: the last of the three trios in the opening scene, for instance, the sextet, the men’s laughing trio, the stretto of the Act 1 finale, or the end of the ‘lesson-in-love’ quartet. In much of the slower music he is apt to luxuriate. The farewell quintet is a case in point, but it is agonizingly lovely; the heavenly trio that follows too is leisurely, with a cloudy, sensuous quality to the sound…"