Mozart Don Giovanni [DVD] [2011] [NTSC]

I remember seeing Glyndebourne's last attempt at Don Giovanni. This was the Graham Vick production, in 2000, featuring a dead horse on a slag heap. I am pleased to see that the company has cut its losses and commissioned a new production for 2010.

Director Jonathan Kent says that he has set this opera on the cusp between the 1950s and the 1960s, a time of huge social change, mirroring the Enlightenment when Mozart's opera was written. This does mean that the production is in more-or-less modern dress but this is not a drawback because Kent tells the story very clearly. Some of the updating is quite effective. The Don kills the Commendatore by smashing him with a brick. Leporello takes Polaroids of all the Don's conquests and illustrates his catalogue aria with a photo album. Other updates do not work so well. I was around in 1960 and I do not remember ever attending a masked ball. Also, the scene where master and servant swap clothes to conceal their identities does not work in modern dress. Come to think about it, who used to go around with a manservant in 1960? Only Prince Charles perhaps.

Gerald Finlay makes a convincingly seductive Don. Possibly seductive is the wrong word since his encounter with Donna Anna is depicted as a brutal rape by a masked intruder. There are strong performances by Anna Samuil in this role and Anna Virovlansky as Zerlina. Luca Pisaroni was vocally effective but I found his Leporello a bit too pusillanimous. Some Leporellos admire the Don, others resent him. This one just did what he was told.

Kate Royal gave a good account of Donna Elvira but this is a thankless role. Her function in the plot is to interrupt the Don whenever he is about to get his leg over, quite literally in the case of his seduction of Zerlina.

The first act is one of the most effective that I have ever seen. Particularly impressive is Paul Brown's set, a sort of rotating box of tricks. The second act is less effective. This is invariably the case with this opera. Even Mozart's wonderful music cannot sustain its episodic structure for the full three hours. It ends a bit like a George Romero shocker. The Don and Leporello don't come across the Commendatore's statue, they find his grave and promply dig him up to invite him to dinner. Inevitably, instead of being dragged down to hell by demons, the Don is just dragged into the zombielike Commendatore's grave.

I am not an expert on opera, but i love the music of Mozart and I have opinions about how his music should be performed. This staging of the great opera masterpiece is very good. There are several reasons: To set the story to the 1950 is relevant and give meaning to me. The traditional stage where the action is static is avoided.
Here the acting is realistic but most important is the music. The tempo is faster than in more traditionel versions.

It is interesting to compare the music in this version to the famous version with Karl BÔhm with the Wiener Phil from 1977. Here the tempo is faster ( sometime slower), and the heavy "romantic" conducting is avoided to a more modern interpretation. The orkestra here using original instruments and the music is more dramatic and lyrical at the same time. All the singers here is doing a very professional and good job - and there is also great moments here: Gerald Finley has the needed masculinity but are takeing care of the lyrical lines as well. A couples of his arias is impressing! Anna Samuil is the ultimate diva and is giving us sublime beauty.
Don Giovanni might be a strange opera, but it is a opera buffa and the comic parts are taken care of here. You are offered both entertainment and great art at the same time. Mozart and Da Ponte smiles...T. Strange, Norway

The concept behind Jonathan Kent's production of Don Giovanni for Glyndebourne 2010 is somewhat tenuous in how its 1950s' setting relates to the pre-Enlightenment years of the opera's original period, but it proves to be not entirely without merit. It's not that Don Giovanni doesn't bear up well to modern interpretations - it's perhaps the Mozart opera most apt and subject to contemporary reworking - it's just that, even with the free-love of the 1960s just around the corner, the production's supposed "Fellini-esque vision of post-war life" doesn't succeed in grasping the spirit of the period or present all that convincing a parallel to the Age of Enlightenment.

The production at least starts off like it intends to make something of the risqué premise of Mozart's opera, with a quite brutal enactment of the rape and murder scene, but thereafter, it settles down to a rather non-committal blandness. The 1950s' setting doesn't really suit the wider European expansive viewpoint of the continental philanderer, but rather closes it down without seeming to bring any exciting or meaningful new ideas to the table in its place. The drabness and unimaginativeness of the setting (although technically impressive) is unfortunately reflected in the performances, which rather lack commitment. Everyone, but everyone - particularly Anna Samuil's Donna Anna - seems to walk around in a trance, scarcely showing any feeling or expression of the predilections and predicaments of their characters. The singing is generally fine throughout, with a delicate touch - the same can be said about the orchestration by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on period instruments under the direction of Vladimir Jurowski - all very nicely and smoothly played, but much too nicely, with no passion, no torment, no raging desire and no agony of betrayal.

It's only towards the end of Act 1 that the purpose of the setting and the Fellini-esque elements come into play, with a wonderfully hedonistic party straight out of La Dolce Vita. For all the lack of fire elsewhere, the close to the first Act quite literally sets the stage alight, as the Don Giovanni's ambitions are unmasked at the party by his guests, their accusations directed forcefully against the libertine, and with it a condemnation that prefigures of the damnation of the nobleman for his crimes against humanity. With his Polaroids of the Don's conquests, Luca Pisaroni's Leporello here then is the Paparazzo to the Gerald Finley's Marcello, the two of them on a search for the ultimate high in the swinging lifestyle of the rich and famous. Like Marcello, Don Giovanni has pushed his hedonistic excesses to their limit, losing his humanity in the process, and his only recourse is towards the spiritual or the supernatural. Don Giovanni's downfall here then lies not so much in any kind of divine or infernal retribution as much as the inevitable result of his hubris for believing himself above mere mortals and worthy of consorting with those on an unearthly plane.

The concept behind the staging comes briefly through at this point, but although it provides one or two other fine moments (a tender scene between Zerlina and Masetto and a blood-spurting finale that is more Night of the Living Dead than La Dolce Vita), the remainder of the production unfortunately seems to rather go through the motions of delivering the story and its moral without adding anything new or challenging to the conventional line. The singers likewise seem to concentrate on delivering their lines and on hitting all the right notes at the right points, but without any real fire or ambition. All in all, it's a fine production that keeps the story accessible and meaningful, but there's not much here that can be said to be truly memorable.