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Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House |
Sunny days for the Don – then hellfire
PREVIEW: DON GIOVANNI
Royal Opera House
The ROH’s opening night of the season on Monday, a revival of the 2002 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, was a great night at the opera, with a whole new audience brought in through an adventurous collaboration between The Sun newspaper and the Helen Hamlyn Trust “to create a night at the opera just for Sun readers”.
Tickets cost no more than £10 and the performance was relayed to 113 cinemas in the UK and across Europe.
The one piece semi-abstract set, designed by Maria Björnson, is a curved wall that swivels round to suggest various streetscapes, and interiors.
With stylised period costumes and beautifully lit by Paul Pyant, it works well, suggesting the period feel without too much overlay. It also provides the required moments of spectacle for the two great finales: a grand 18th century banqueting hall and a pyrotechnic display for the hellfires that consume Giovanni at the end.
But the direction by Francesca Zambello is sometimes perverse, working against the singers. Ineptly handled scene changes confuse and slow down the action.
Simon Keenlyside as the Don seems somehow diminished and lightweight. He always sings beautifully but his strange get-up, with a long mane of hair, simply looks odd, certainly not seductive.
Zambello’s attempt to suggest a homoerotic aspect to the Don’s character tells us more about her preoccupations than Mozart’s.
Kyle Ketelsen’s well sung Leporello creates an endearing and vivid character in the classic mould. Marina Poplavskaya has a most beautiful voice and the technical mastery for Donna Anna, although she sounded a bit stretched by the notoriously high tessitura of her arias; this may have been due to the infection from which she was said to be suffering.
Ramon Vargas’s Don Ottavio was elegantly sung, and American mezzo Joyce di Donato was a feisty Donna Elvira.
Miah Person was a somewhat charmless Zerlina but her Masetto, Robert Gleadow, displayed an attractive voice.
Eric Halfvarson sang well as the Commendatore but there’s no statue. His Act II appearances were accompanied by what appeared to be a bejewelled octopus swaying around in the air, only partly visible from where I was sitting. It later turned out to be a pointing hand.
It was one of several irritating miscalculations by Zambello.
The gratuitous vision of the Don seen seducing a woman in hell during the closing seconds of the opera, was another.
Charles Mackerras works his usual magic in the pit although for me, the re-placing of appoggiatures was excessive and undermines the emotional intensity of the vocal lines.
Helen Lawrence
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