This Don Giovanni unarguably seduces
The celebrated opera singer and director Thomas Allen never tires of Mozart’s great opera Don Giovanni. As performer, the baritone played the eponymous, Hell-bound rake somewhere in the region of 350 times. Now, as director, he is reviving his 2013 staging of the piece for Scottish Opera. Transposed from Seville to a bleak, splendidly designed Venice, it is an unarguable success.
The moral weight of the drama is established in the opening moments. No sooner has the piece got underway than Don Giovanni has sexually assaulted the young Donna Anna and killed her outraged father, the Commendatore. A notorious lecher who keeps a book of his sexual conquests, Giovanni is in a tight spot, pursued, as he is, by a diverse posse of those he has wronged. However, before temporal law can catch up with him, the spirit world exacts a spectacular revenge on the unrepentant libertine.
The opera demands a big central performance, and it certainly has that in English baritone Roland Wood (who passes the role to Jonathan McGovern midway through this tour). Airily dismissive of all moral objections, Wood’s Giovanni treats every brush with justice as a mere game. Indeed, his grand gesture at the end of Act 1 (when he strides through the flames in his own hearth), is a fabulous premonition of the ghostly retribution to come.
If Wood impresses greatly, so, too, do the three female leads: Hye-Youn Lee (Donna Anna), Kitty Whately (Donna Elvira) and Lea Shaw (Zerlina). Lee, in particular, delivers the great aria “Non mi dir” (“Tell me not”) – sung to her character’s dubious fiancé, Don Ottavio – with searing, persuasive emotion.
The cast – in which Pablo Bemsch plays the dubiously gallant Don Ottavio and Emyr Wyn Jones the outraged peasant bridegroom Masetto – is universally excellent. Crucially, the Scottish Opera orchestra – under the baton of Stuart Stratford – has a tremendous grasp of the deft, dramatic interplay between Mozart’s music and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s vibrant libretto.
The opera straddles the comic and metaphysical traditions of European drama. On the one hand, it demands that we suspend our disbelief when two people (Giovanni and his servant Leporello) fool everyone into thinking that they are the other person merely by exchanging clothes. On the other, it requires us to believe that the underworld has a magnetic pull on the souls of miscreants.
That Allen’s revival succeeds on the comic front is down, in no small measure, to the performance of American bass-baritone Zachary Altman as the put-upon Leporello. The scene in which the servant takes on not only the garb, but also the voice of his master is executed to comic perfection by Altman and Wood (who, in their mischief-making, look like a double act from the commedia dell’arte). Such levity contrasts starkly with the opera’s gloriously melodramatic conclusion, when the excellent Keel Watson – as the animated statue of the Commendatore – exacts his supernatural revenge.
Touring until June 25; scottishopera.org.uk
