The Royal Opera
House Covent Garden has revived for the third time director Kasper Holten’s
visually stunning and vocally superb 2014 production of Don Giovanni.
It features vocal splendour from bassos Erwin Schrott and Roberto Tagliavini
and magnificent soprano singing from Malin Bystrom and Myrto Papatanasiu And it has hugely imaginative
designs and use of lighting.
Schrott as Don
Giovanni and Tagliavini are a well-matched pair with big, resonant voices and
physical agility. They can change identities with a switch of a coat and a hat,
and they give a marvellous performance as rascals, master and servant duellers,
abusers and vocal marvels.
Production photo of Don Giovanni. © 2019 ROH. Photograph by Mark Douet
Malin Bystrom
has a gorgeous, big voice and her performance as Donna Anna, the putative
victim of Don Giovanni is second to none. I say putative because I am convinced
that she was not assaulted by Don Giovanni at all. I state this on the
information gleaned from the way Holten presents the opening scene.
In the first
scene she comes out of her bedroom wearing a beautiful evening gown which means
she just returned from a high society event. She is trying to prevent Don
Giovanni from leaving her and not the opposite. Later she tells her fiancée Don
Ottavio that Don Giovanni’s identity was concealed under a cloak and therefore she
could not recognize him. We know that he had no cloak in fact and was fully
visible.
In the end when
she tells Ottavio that she wants to wait
a year before marrying him, it is for love of Don Giovanni and not for grieving
for her father for whose death she is partly responsible. A fascinating
portrayal of Donna Anna.
Myrto
Papatanasiu sings Donna Elvira beautifully and with wonderful expressiveness.
When she expresses her love and is not angry or vengeful, she is a woman in
anguish, moving, lyrical, sometimes hopeful and always vocally wonderful. I had
a problem with her failure to express her anger, indeed fury, when she declares
her desire to be avenged on the treacherous Don Giovanni who seduced her and
then abandoned her in a matter of days.
Tenor Daniel
Behle as Ottavio is a man of promises but no achievement. He wears a tuxedo in
his first appearance which may mean he and Donna Anna just returned from the
fancy gig. What does he do? He goes to bed and Donna Anna lets in a lusty
visitor. Behle sings the gorgeous arias of the vacuous Don Ottavio very well.
Leon
Kosavic as Masetto and Louise Alder as Zerlina.
© 2019 ROH. Photograph by Mark
Douet
The peasant
couple of Zerlina (Louise Alder) and Masetto (Leon Kosavic) are a delight. She
is wearing a bridal gown and tosses her flower to the guests and has no
difficulty handling the oafish Masetto. She almost leaves him at the altar,
comforts him after he is thrashed and always ends up on top. Lovely singing and
acting. Masetto sings well but he is
dressed in a fine suit. I think he should look more rural but it is a small
point.
The staging has
exceptionally high production values. The set by Es Devlin consists of a cubic
two-story structure with staircases in the centre. It is set on a revolving
stage with moveable panels providing a great deal of flexibility.
Holten goes much
further than that in his imaginative use of lighting and video projections. In
the opening scene we see projected on the “house” hundreds of names. They are
the women that Don Giovanni seduced around Europe. We will see the projection a
few times as a reminder of Giovanni’s character.
The mostly black
and white projections will be varied as when the Commendatore (Brindley
Sherratt) is murdered and the set is bathed in red. There is continuous and
intelligent use of various light effects and video projection that add
immensely to the quality of the production. All is done without resort to
melodramatics. There is not even a speaking statue of the Commendatore, only a
bust which is broken to pieces and the guilt-ridden Donna Anna picks from the
floor.
Hartmut Haenchen
conducts the Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus for a marvellous evening at
the opera.
_____________________
Don Giovanni by W. A. Mozart is being performed eight times
between September 16 and October 10, 2019 on various dates at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London,
England. www.roh.org.uk
James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press. greekpress.ca
Thanks so much for all the wonderful information about a production I've been dying to know more about. I tried to scrape together the money for a brief trip to London to see it, but it was not to be. And this year it's playing online by Greek National Opera nationalopera.gr ans can't wait to watch
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