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Mozart wanted even his darkest operas to end with the characters reconciled and order restored, and so he followed the fiery disappearance of Don Giovanni with a cheery little sextet in which the survivors tell everyone to mend his ways. Sellars' contemporary sensibility seems unable to accept such a stylized ending, and so he attributes the sextet not to the survivors of the disaster but to the suffering ghosts of those same survivors.
This tormented sensibility also afflicts Sellars' gloomy version of Cosi. It is full of visual gags (the two heroes pretending to go to war are waved on by crowds carrying signs such as BURN THE SUPREME COURT), but it has very little of Mozart's cynical vivacity. The plot derives from a rather cruel bet: two young men agree to adopt disguises and try to seduce each other's fiancees. Alas, it proves all too easy, but after a reasonable amount of tears and outcries, everyone is reconciled at the end. Not in Sellars' version. Here they finish in an angry brawl, and according to Sellars, "the opera ends as they scream the words 'beautiful calm' against gale-force turbulence in the orchestra."
This orchestra, like Sellars' repertory company of gifted young singers, performs admirably under the deft and scrupulous conducting of Craig Smith, and so it is a pleasure to find that Sellars has pretty much left the performers alone in one of the three operas, Figaro. The setting in the Trump Tower is no more than a mild gag, not another excuse for wholesale Sellarsization. Donald Trump does not appear from behind a bush. The singers just sing, and sing beautifully. What a relief!