Merola tackles Mozart’s ambiguous comedy

Compared with the gleaming clockwork precision of “The Marriage of Figaro” or the demonic ferocity of “Don Giovanni,” “Così” straddles a delicate tonal divide, with the surface of a parlor-room comedy masking dark subterranean depths.

How much of that troubled core to reveal is a decision every director has to make anew, but the piece can be done equally persuasively as a straightforward jape about sexual infidelity or a probing drama of love and betrayal.

[...] Mozart’s inexhaustible musical imagination carries the day.