Musically, the COC’s new Don Giovanni is just about as good as it gets. The orchestra under its long-time director Johannes Debus, alongside the COC chorus and the soloists with baritone Gordon Bintner in the title role perform this work as it should be performed: as a perpetuum mobile machine which blasts on from duo to quartet to sextet to aria to recit to trio to aria to trio again, without a second of respite. This was for the longest time my favourite opera of any era, still probably is among the top 5, which I initially consumed over and over as an audio recording (the drama is in-built in the score, do you even need the theatre). The recitatives, accompanied beautifully by Simone Luti on piano from the pit, provided some relatively quieter moments but this opera never takes a break, and neither does our main man’s greed for conquest.
Rare is a Don Ottavio who stands out above all the other, much more interesting characters in the story, but tenor Ben Bliss accomplished that. The rest of the team were all capable, idiomatic singers: Mané Galoyan as Donna Anna, Simone McIntosh as Zerlina, Joel Allison as Masetto, Anita Hartig as Elvira (after a bit of a warm-up) and David Leigh as Il Commendatore. I would single out Paolo Bordogna as Leporello as even more idiomatic than the rest, and an excellent comic actor.
Of the set-pieces in this accomplished performance, I would highlight the trio of the masks just before they enter Don Giovanni’s ball (Galoyan, Bliss and Hartig), anything with Galoyan and Bliss, the Bliss arias, the two-bands-on-stage-plus-the-orchestra-in-the-pit scene during Don Giovanni’s ball, which is a palaver to coordinate, and the final Don Giovanni dinner with the dead Commendatore, come to collect the noble and dispatch him to Hell. Oh and the mandolin song with Bintner serenading yet another woman - a supernumerary, this time.
Production-wise? This is one of the best-travelled, most streamed productions by the Royal Opera House’s former director Kasper Holten, here revived by Amy Lane—you can find a lot of clips on YouTube—that, I’ve concluded, probably works much better on video. The set (Es Devlin) is a sort of an Advent Calendar type set with mobile parts, and it turns into a revolving cube with some strategically removed walls and the Escher-like staircases. There are two lighting designers credited, and a projection designer and his associate, and no wonder, as projections do a lot of work here.
There are shades of women past, and five ghostly women (supernumeraries) who move from room to room as the action around them happens. The murdered Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father, also appears at the edges of some scenes, to return full-time for the final confrontation.
It’s all fun to look at and keeps you intrigued until about hour two, when the eyes tire of the damned box and you wish for an escape. Perhaps this is supposed to tell us that there’s no escaping from a powerful district lech while everyone is on his company’s (so to speak) payroll? The walls of one’s own psyche? The town as narrow and confined as Don Giovanni’s household? Whatever it is, it’s hard for a revolving box and an advent calendar wall to be all of this, without something being lost in the process:
- The garden of the Commendatore
- A square outside Don Giovanni’s palace
- Countryside, for the peasant wedding
- A garden outside Don Giovanni’s pile
- Don’s ballroom
- Just outside Donna Elvira’s house (she’s come from away but apparently rents while fuming about DG’s betrayal, and also perhaps stalking him a little)
- A dark courtyard (where DG deceives Donna Elvira, Cyrano-style, into think that his servant is him; she is thrilled that this darkness-protected DG finally gives her his full attention)
- A graveyard with the Commendatore statue
- Donna Anna’s room (a whole different house somewhere in the same town)
- DG’s chambers for the final cena
Even with the smart projections - which move from abstract to figurative, depending on the scene and the music - the inertness of the set will inevitably make itself noticed.
The run is almost sold-out but there are still a few tickets left for each of the remaining performances; the best bet would probably be to go for a rush on the night. One of the reasons that this is such a popular production might be that the previous one, by Dimitri Tcherniakov, upset the traditionalists and even the moderates so much that everyone’s still smarting from the affair. (Some of you will remember that Tcherniakov set the proceedings within a family compound owned by a nouveau riche Russian oligarch figure as the latter-day Commendatore, with Don Giovanni as his shaggy dog, old Hippie son-in-law who just likes women too much. It was a workable and fun concept until the dark backyard scenes, where the concept entirely fell apart and we had Leporello, the Don and Donna Elvira sitting around in a carpeted room, not knowing what to do with themselves. Disguise? Pfft. An old-fashioned device, can’t be bothered. Etc. etc.)
But if the Don ticks musically, that is enough for it to be spectacular. And this production doesn’t for the most part get in the way. It sometimes even adds to the music - if not as frequently as I’d wish it to. Never miss a Don Giovanni.