Review

Don Giovanni hits on Philadelphia

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“Maybe choosing this particular lady wasn’t one of my best ideas”

Don Giovanni never reveals what is going on inside his head. As he tears his way through the opera bearing his name he never stops to explain himself. His only important solo moments are extremely brief: the Act 1 “champagne aria” and Act 2 serenade. He is the opera’s mysterious center, but he also can, sometimes, more or less disappear. Such is the situation in Opera Philadelphia’s current production, which boasts a fine musical performance with a few first-rate singers, a dubious production, and not very much Don.


Mozart, Don Giovanni. Opera Philadelphia at the Academy of Music, 4/25/2014. Production by Nicholas Muni, conducted by George Manahan. With Elliot Madore (Don Giovanni), Joseph Barron (Leporello), Michelle Johnson (Donna Anna), Amanda Majeski (Donna Elvira), David Portillo (Don Ottavio), Ceceila Hall (Zerlina), Wes Mason (Masetto), Nicholas Masters (Commendatore)

Ottavio and Anna

Nicholas Muni’s production is period-minimalist, the set only a few sliding walls. He seems to want to keep the sight gags and comedy of a lighthearted work, but also wants to focus on Catholicism (there is also an anachronistic painting motif in the set, whose significance escapes me). The result is rather shallow, and doesn’t really do anything to place the Don himself. The production’s best moments are the most straightforward storytelling ones, some of which make the characters really come alive. I liked, for example, the point when Donna Anna rushes back to her father’s body as Don Ottavio promises to be her father too. Donna Elvira gets the best character arc, going from a trouser-wearing lady of vengeance to a Catholic redeemer. But the frequent brandishing of crosses feels heavy-handed at best, and much of the action is far too cluttered and has little relationship with the music (particularly the confusing staged overture).

Muni also supplies Don Giovanni with a number of nameless onstage conquests, many of whom are unlikely (an old woman, a nun, etc.). It is clearly meant to be funny. But by using women as mute props–and by suggesting we laugh at their unlikely ravishment–the production isn’t only telling us something about Don Giovanni. It’s also validating his view of the women as silent, disposable objects, and moreover it is built on the assumption that the women are themselves grotesque. This is unfortunate. Similarly, I am on the record as a major non-fan of suggestions that Donna Anna has a candle burning for Don Giovanni, and this production ticks that box too. A few of the production’s other failures are merely logistical: the Commendatore’s tomb appears in the cemetery scene and then stays there, making the singer’s entrance both redundant and not very terrifying. And one should not describe the descent down to hell, which is simply cheesy.

This production, however, is worth seeing for the three women alone, all of whom gave compelling performances. Amanda Majeski has just the right incisive precision for Donna Elvira, though her tightly focused soprano thinned out a bit at the top. She made “Mi tradì” a real story instead of an obstacle course. Michelle Johnson, as Donna Anna, has a glamorous, rich voice, and might be a star in the making. Her “Or sai chi l’onore” was big and exciting. She seems, however, more of a verista than a Mozartian at heart, and her phrasing was sometimes wanting in elegance, particularly in “Non mi dir,” which is not her home turf. And while I am not normally on Team Mezzo Zerlina, Ceceilia Hall was a model of graceful musicality, and her acting was sympathetic without being cloying or cutesy. She and Wes Mason’s likeable, well-sung Masetto were the only convincing couple onstage (OK, this might have been intentional).

Teh peasants

The men were not as strong. As Don Ottavio, David Portillo has a sweet tone, can vary the color nicely, and unwound some good long phrases, though he sounded more at home in “Dalla sua pace” than in “Il mio tesoro.” (I enjoyed getting both of these arias, though.) Joseph Barron was a competent but unmemorable Leporello, and the sight gags of large corsets (and a really tiny corset–which, um, yay? haha?) and a really massive list stole his big number.  Unfortunately I have left Elliot Madore’s Don Giovanni for last. While the character may be a mystery, Madore’s wide-stance, eyebrow-wiggling antics never transcended frat boy petulance or suggested anything more than a bro on a bender. His deepish baritone is fine for the role, though I wish “Deh vieni” had floated a bit more. While he was always energetic, the interpretation seemed haphazard–the production could have done a lot to help him out here.

The orchestra mostly sounded clean and clear. George Manahan’s tempos tended towards the leisurely and coordination wasn’t always perfect, but the finales were well-paced. More than in most operas, it was a real shame to lose the stage bands, who here were heard from the pit. Despite its dramatic faults this is a performance that is worth hearing.

Don Giovanni continues through May 4.
Photos copyright Kelly and Massa.

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Review

Don Giovanni in the Trees

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A forest is a dangerous place: a symbol for the unknown and the unconscious, both the embrace and the threats of nature and a natural state. In fairy tales, characters enter the forest to find themselves, but they inevitably find peril as well.

In this 2008 Salzburg Festival production on DVD (Amazon), Claus Guth stages Don Giovanni in just such a forest, a group of pines that rotate on a turntable to disorienting effect. Is there a world outside of it? Sometimes mist rises threateningly in the background. But despite the presence of a bus stop and Don Ottavio’s car, there’s no exit. Don Giovanni and Leporello are a mortally wounded and drug-addled Vladimir and Estragon who are waiting for… something.

I needed an antidote to the Met’s empty Don Giovanni of a few weeks ago, and this production was perfect. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s fascinating and very smartly done. The Commendatore seems to escape the duel OK, but Don Giovanni is mortally wounded and spends the rest of the opera dying; it’s never clear whether the rest of the events are actually happening or just his fervid memories or delusions. This twist plus the surreal setting mean there’s a fair amount of the plot that is not staged literally (the Serenade is sung out to the audience as a memory of seductions gone by, almost a mad scene), but this actually makes the episodic second act work unusually smoothly. The characters are modernized: Donna Anna is repressed housewife engaged to the useless yuppie Ottavio (yeah, this problem), Donna Elvira is a repressed businesswoman who is actually sex-crazed (kind of an ugly characterization, but  I can see how it comes out of the text). It’s dark and spooky–literally in terms of darkness–and the sextet at the end gets the axe. (It’s the Vienna version of the score, which means there’s the little Leporello-Zerlina duet but no Il mio tesoro and no final sextet. The cans of Pilsner Urquell may be an allusion to the opera’s Prague premiere, though.)

The main disappointment of the production is Bertrand de Billy’s bland conducting. He goes with HIP fleetness, but the Wiener Philharmoniker plays with so much vibrato that the pitch in the overture actually doesn’t seem quite stable somehow. Fortunately the cast can both sing really well and carry off the complex production convincingly. Christopher Maltman gives an intense performance in the title role, with the kind of magnetism required of a Don Giovanni and a beautiful, fairly light voice. Other vocal highlights are Dorothea Röschmann’s powerhouse Donna Elvira and Ekaterina Siurina’s impeccable Zerlina. Theatrically, Erwin Schrott’s Leporello carries the show. I’ve seen Schrott as the Don in several different productions (I’m not a particular fan but there were a few years when you basically couldn’t see a Don Giovanni without him in the title role), but I wonder if he isn’t actually better as Leporello. It suits his low voice better, and also his wit and comic timing (his Don was sometimes too funny). Anyway, here Leporello is going through some drug issues and it isn’t going well. The cast’s only major weakness is Annette Dasch as Donna Anna, whose squally tone and iffy intonation are tough on the ears, though she acts well. Matthew Polenzani is a well-sung but rather faceless Ottavio.

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Review

Don Giovanni at the Met

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The Met has rounded up a good cast for this Don Giovanni premiere, particularly stellar late replacements Fabio Luisi conducting and Peter Mattei in the title role. It’s a shame that despite a lot of excellent singing the evening rarely rose above lukewarm. Michael Grandage’s fearsomely homogenizing and tame production bulldozed any personality in its path.

Mozart/Da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Metropolitan Opera, 10/13/11. New production premiere, directed by Michael Grandage and conducted by Fabio Luisi with Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni), Luca Pisaroni (Leporello), Marina Rebeka (Donna Anna), Barbara Frittoli (Donna Elvira), Ramón Vargas (Don Ottavio), Mojca Erdmann (Zerlina), Joshua Bloom (Masetto), Stefan Kocan (Commendatore).

Based on this and Anna Bolena, the new Met house staging style seems to be “no interpretation allowed.” More on that in a second, let’s start with the interesting and positive part–the music. New principal conductor and Levine stand-in Fabio Luisi led an elegant and clean account of the score, with fast to moderately fast tempos and light textures. He has a fantastic sense of dramatic pace and is never obtrusively showy or different. Everything flowed along as it should. He played the harpsichord continuo himself (the first time I’ve seen a non-HIP conductor do that, I think) and was witty and well-timed without ever straying towards René Jacobs’s sports commentator fortepiano territory. He passed my Don Giovanni conductor test–how is the timing in the Act 2 sextet?–with flying colors.

The cast was almost universally strong, and well-cast for vocal size, projecting without sounding oversized. Peter Mattei’s velvety baritone is the most seductive characteristic of his Giovanni, who otherwise tends towards the aggressive and dangerous. But it is a very sexy voice, and his serenade was a highlight, simple (with tasteful ornamentation in the second strophe) and quiet. He also managed an unusually accurate “Fin ch’han la vino.”

My last impression of Luca Pisaroni was in the Wiener Staatsoper’s Nozze di Figaro, but no singer should be held accountable for that particular production. He was a delight as Leporello, funny and spontaneous in the recitatives and musical and smooth in the big aria. It is nice to see Ramón Vargas back in Mozart as Don Ottavio after his dubious attempts at heavier rep. There was palpable effort in his “Dalla sua pace” messa di voce, but he sounded sweet and clear and the coloratura in “Il mio tesoro” was long-breathed and impressively clean. Stefan Kocan was an undersized Commendatore and Joshua Bloom an excellent Masetto.

Rebeka and Vargas

The women were led by house debutant Marina Rebeka as Donna Anna (like 60% of singers these days, she is Latvian). Her cool, somewhat steely and white soprano isn’t naturally glamorous, but everything was evenly produced, elegantly musical, and solid, including her coloratura. She’s quite loud and tended to dominate the ensembles. Barbara Frittoli’s much warmer and richer-voiced Elvira was an excellent contrast to Rebeka. Her top notes often turned wobbly but I appreciated her refinement. The cast’s weak link was Mojca Erdmann’s Zerlina, whose fragile, very small soprano awkwardly shifted between a straight silvery tone and an excess of vibrato. Her phrasing was inexpressive.

But despite the good performances, no one gave a true star turn. Zachary Woolfe’s “charisma” and JJ’s “glamour” were both in short supply. The extraordinarily bland production may be to blame. If you gave any opera buff or stage manager this set and these costumes and told them to produce the most conventional Don Giovanni they could imagine, they’d probably come up with something like it. The Personenregie is detailed and not that bad, meaning that it’s clear and it’s not static. Mattei and Pisaroni are strong actors, Vargas and Rebeka less so. But Grandage has no perspective on a work that really demands interpretative unpacking. Don Giovanni is a weird, fascinating, confusing, contradictory opera, it’s a black hole of mystery, but no personality at all emerges from these harmless characters. They all seem to lack individuality and soul. It’s a smoothly executed job, but there’s nothing beneath the surface, and fails to draw you in emotionally.

Christopher Oram’s set has multiple levels of balconies and lots of little doors. This is a look we’ve seen before at the Met and it’s not one I like. The tiny space at each balcony doesn’t allow for much action, and Donna Anna and Don Giovanni’s confrontation at the beginning of the opera (something I care about a lot) was so constricted in space that you couldn’t tell what was being expressed. (I was gratified that she did not seem to like him very much, though.) The walls move around a bit, creating some variety, but it’s basically a unit set. The costumes, also by Oram, are basic frilly 18th century, with a side of our favorite (meaning least favorite) time period, the Slutty 18th Century, when even Donna Anna’s mourning dress displays lots of cleavage.

Ben Wright’s choreography is rather busy and fills the stage during Zerlina’s wedding and the first act finale, but it seems to function solely as a space filler. Grandage surrounds Giovanni with some downmarket ladies of the night in the last scene, hardly as daring a move as giving them to Scarpia but still the most originality to be found here. The final scene is a conflation of an anticlimactic Darth Vader entrance by the Commendatore and the Fire Swamp scene from The Princess Bride (minus the ROUSes, unfortunately). After a lot of am dram shaking, some hellfire does start up, but it’s too little, too late.

Despite the musical accomplishment, this was an unfulfilling evening. Unlike Jean-Louis Martinoty’s recent Wiener Staatsoper train wreck, it is not a confusing or incompetent Don, just an empty one with a discouraging lack of intellectual curiosity. Very disappointing.

Photos copyright Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera (special thanks to @PaulCavaradossi)

Curtain Call (photos courtesy of B., who unlike me had a camera and was on the orchestra level):

Video: Peter Mattei sings “Da vieni alla finestra” in a different production.

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Donna Anna Wore a Short Skirt

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“The fire of a superhuman sensuality, a glow from Hell, had cast its reflection over her senses and she was powerless to resist. Only he, only Don Juan, could awaken in her the erotic madness which she lavished upon him.”
-E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Don Giovanni” (1812), trans. Chistopher Lazare (A.A. Wyn, 1946)
[“Das Feuer einer übermenschlichen Sinnlichkeit, Glut aus der Hölle, durchströmte ihr Innerstes und machte jeden Widerstand vergeblich. Nur er, nur Don Juan konnte den wollüstigen Wahnsinn in ihr entzünden, mit dem sie ihn umfing, der mit der übermächtigen, zerstörenden Wut höllischer Geister im Innern sündigte.”]

“Towards all her fellow-creatures [Donna Anna] presents a coldly correct personality… it would be beneficial to her personal growing-up if she had been pleasantly raped by Don Juan.”
-William Mann, The Operas of Mozart (1977), page 468.

This post is apropos the upcoming new production of Don Giovanni at the Met. There’s one thing I will be watching for very carefully.

Donna Anna, the noblest of the three women in Don Giovanni, tends to have a bad reputation. She is “self-absorbed and aloof” (Edward Dent), “has etiquette where her feelings should be” or is “cardboard” (these citations are from Kristi Brown-Montesano’s excellent Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas). Moreover, whatever happened offstage with Giovanni, no one seems to think it was actually rape. The more you look at the text, the more convoluted this reading looks, and its grounding in the assumption that no woman alive could resist Don Giovanni (ignoring the fact that Zerlina ultimately seems to as well) is pretty offensive.

The action of the opera really begins when Donna Anna cries for rescue from a strange man in her bedroom. Her screams attract the attention of her father. He and Don Giovanni (for that is who it is) fight a duel and Don Giovanni kills the old man, thus setting off the opera’s plot. Here it is. (This staging isn’t the best but I chose it because it has English subtitles.)

The entire disturbance is touched off by Anna herself, with her line “Unless you kill me, you have no hope of escaping me.” (“Non sperar, se non m’ucidi, ch’io ti lasci fuggir mai.”) This has been often reinterpreted as, “I want you so bad.” But her following lines, crying out for servants to help catch Giovanni (which, as she must have anticipated, also catch the attention of her father), seem rather to make a secret tryst rather implausible.

The second scene contains this dialogue:
LEPORELLO: Bravo, two pretty deeds!
Force the daughter and kill the father!
DON GIOVANNI: He wanted to fight.
LEPORELLO: But Donna Anna, did she want to?
DON GIOVANNI: Silence, don’t bother me, away unless
you want something too!

Later, Donna Anna recounts the events of the night to her fiancé, Don Ottavio. Her journey through various minor keys in the recitative gives it a tense cast; Don Ottavio tends to respond in a reassuring (or, according to some, gullible) major. She then goes into her aria “Or sai chi l’onore,” wishing for vengeance on her father’s killer and, most importantly, resolving the tension of the recitative in a heated pledge of revenge for the wrongs done onto her.

E.T.A. Hoffmann was one of the earliest and most influential of the “Anna wanted/needed it” school. In his “tale” based on the opera, quoted above (full text in a different translation available here), Anna has both a passion for Giovanni and the potential to become his redeemer. Far from a a villain, the nineteenth century’s Giovanni was a tragic hero, independent, virile, charismatic, etc. Donna Anna receives a Katerina Ismailova-like awakening courtesy of his invasion. (This is generally not seen onstage. Thank goodness for small favors.) In Hoffmann’s telling, Anna then feels massive guilt after her father’s death, which sparks her lust for vengeance:

Even the raging love that consumed her soul with hellish flames, flaring up at the moment of highest gratification, was aglow, now, with annihilating hatred… she feels that only the destruction of Don Juan can bring peace to her mortally troubled soul.

Hoffmann claims to interpret the opera “purely in terms of the music and ignoring the text.”

The idea that Anna just must have felt some passion for Don Giovanni persists in both criticism and staging, though usually in subtler form than William Mann’s astonishing pronouncement that she should be “pleasantly raped.” Funnily enough, some of these analyses also claim to rest on an interpretation of the music rather than the text, but reach very different conclusions from Hoffmann. Alfred Einstein and, most convolutedly, R.B. Moberly (Three Mozart Operas, 1967) read Donna Anna’s narration to Ottavio as deceptive and dishonest (the music supposedly betrays her), and interpret her ambivalence towards Don Ottavio not as grief or trauma but as a telltale sign of her secret passion for Don Giovanni. This analysis was thoroughly demolished by Julian Rushton in his Cambridge Opera Guide to Don Giovanni: “The real indecency here [that Anna cares for Giovanni rather than Ottavio] is to suggest, in line with the worst present-day mores, that she could not care so deeply about her father, nor be horrified by the attempt upon herself.”

Stage productions today often show a Donna Anna secretly in love with Don Giovanni. But they do this with an air of Freudian mystification as to the impulses of Woman. Anna turns up as an enigma who has no idea what she wants. To me this confusion seems quite directly contrary to her portrayal in any part of the opera text. This is a lady who knows exactly who she is and what she wants to do. Making her indecisive and infatuated reinforces a value system where the Don is a hero and woman is weak. I think there’s also a lot of pseudo-empowered “she is uncontrollably attracted to dangerous men and that makes her sexy,” which is all grounded in a big pile of patriarchy, as well as the mind-blowing assumptions cited by Rushton. Besides, isn’t her righteous anger pretty badass already?

To echo Rushton, the real indecency here is how contemporary society just doesn’t take the word of a woman who says she’s been raped seriously. Donna Anna enjoyed it and is just feeling guilty because she revealed herself as a slut. This kind of rape denial shit is an enormous problem for women today everywhere, and this particular interpretation seems to be in line with the worst present-day mores.

For example, consider Anna’s actions here in Martin Kusej’s Salzburg production. I’m aware I’m considering this out of the context of the production, but it is the first scene.

This seems to be fairly typical these days with the exception of some by-the-books traditional productions. Francesca Zambello’s production when I saw it in London had Anna kissing the Don (though it’s done differently on the DVD, interestingly enough), and Jean-Louis Martinoty’s Viennese train wreck last December (pictured at the top of this post) gave her an S&M thing. I find it very disappointing that some productions that seem to have a lot of thought put into them (I am not including Martinoty here) still default to such a reflexively patriarchal portrayal.

Or take Calixto Bieito:

I can’t tell if Renée is entertaining second thoughts here or if this is just poorly staged:

Can’t we consider the Occam’s Razor of emotional decoding, the simplest solution, which is that Don Giovanni attempted or succeeded in raping Donna Anna and she was very angry about this? Apparently it’s not that easy.

Recommended non-patriarchal Don Giovanni reading:
Kristi Brown-Montesano, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas. University of California Press, 2007.
Daniel Heartz, Mozart’s Operas. University of California Press, 1990.
Julian Rushton, Don Giovanni. Cambridge Opera Handbooks, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds. The Don Giovanni Moment. Columbia University Press, 2008.

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Review

Don Giovanni: Love in a boring climate

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The Wiener Staatsoper’s new production of Don Giovanni was begging to be stolen all night.  Had anyone shown a little initiative and done something exciting, they could have walked off with it in their pocket.  But no, we had a balanced ensemble, and a milquetoast evening it remained to the end.  From the scattered mess of a production to the respectable but not quite distinguished singing, it reminds you that there’s no Don worse than a boring Don.  The orchestra was the best thing about it.

This is historically possibly the single most central work in the Staatsoper’s repertoire, and the disappointment among the premiere crowd was palpable.  Watch out, Herr Meyer, the Stehplatz masses are restless.

Mozart-Da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Wiener Staatsoper, 12/11/2010.  New production premiere by Jean-Louis Martinoty, sets by Hans Schavernoch, costumes by Yan Tx, lights by Fabrice Kebour.  Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst with Ildebrando d’Arcangelo (Don Giovanni), Alex Esposito (Leporello), Sally Matthews (Donna Anna), Roxana Constantinescu (Donna Elvira), Sylvia Schwartz (Zerlina), Saimir Pirgu (Don Ottavio), Albert Dohmen (Commendatore), Adam Plachetka (Masetto)

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An article in the Staatsoper magazine trumpets the learned director Martinoty’s consultation of many other Don Giovanni tales (and he name-drops lots of them in the program book interview).  I don’t know whether to suggest he should have spent more time with Mozart and Da Ponte’s text or just to note that he obviously hasn’t found his own version yet.  Because this is a morally confused, interpretive black hole of an opera, and Martinoty does nothing to suggest who Don Giovanni is, or any of the other characters for that matter.  He sticks in some novelties, but there’s no vision or concept to speak of in an opera that demands one.

The production is set in post-war Spain, for no perceptible reason (maybe 1950’s, but I’m not sure! sometimes it looks more recent).  The stage is steeply raked, with a twisted series of proscenium arches.  The sets by Hans Schavernoch consist of a few projected backdrops of Seville, something that looks like a wine cellar to meet Donna Elvira (?), a hotel lobby for Zerlina and Masetto’s wedding, Don Giovanni’s Baroque party room, a rather nice church in lieu of a cemetery, and Don Giovanni’s banquet hall.  In the latter, the statue–a skeleton–confusingly remains from the cemetery, visible for the entire scene, making its dramatic vocal arrival somewhat anticlimactic.  Finally, the Commendatore shows up in person, despite not having appeared except as bones in the previous scene (see the photo at the top of this post).  The curtain frequently comes down for set changes, never for too long, but the interruption in the flow is unfortunate.  So are the cast traffic jams at the too-small exits.

Fun fact: this is the second production of Don Giovanni I have seen in Vienna that is set in a hotel!  But Keith Warner’s Theater an der Wien job was a sleazy, wild masterpiece, which this one isn’t.

The costumes by Yan Tax are blandly 1950’s-ish until everyone dresses up in period finery for the Act 2 finale, some retaining it for Act 2.  The significance of this masquerade is unclear (because glittery suits are fun, and now there are men with ruffles, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, traditionalists?).  The armies of Mozart lookalikes in the stage bands are amusing, though. Of the lighting, by Fabrice Kebour, welch’ Dunkel hier!  I understand a lot of this opera is supposed to take place in the dark, but, for example, shouldn’t we be able to see Donna Anna’s face for her crucial narration of her abduction by Giovanni?  (Putting her far upstage didn’t help either.)  There are a few scenes of highly designed painterly beauty, but the rest of the opera seems to have been forgotten.  Some illumination is provided by a mysterious bare hanging fluorescent tube, which looks like it was a housewarming gift to Dominique Meyer from Achim Freyer.  But no one took any pictures of it, because it looked weird!

While some of the direction is lively and physical, it doesn’t do a very good job of developing the plot or characters or their relationships.  Sometimes logic fails.  Why doesn’t Leporello react before noting the presence of people in the introduction?  What happens in the confusing duel involving a sword umbrella and a flashlight?  Why does Donna Elvira have a voodoo doll?  Why doesn’t Zerlina look at Don Giovanni during “La cì darem la mano”?  What the hell is going on with that statue?  But in the big picture everyone seems to like Don Giovanni: he and Donna Anna apparently have a consensual S&M thing going on, Donna Elvira just wants him back (despite voodoo), and even Don Ottavio is a good buddy.  And Ildebrando D’Arcangelo’s Don seems like a good guy.  He’s friendly, maybe a little aggressive on the romantic side of things, but basically decent.  And that doesn’t make for a very interesting show.

Donna Elvira (Roxana Constantinescu)

In the arias, Martinoty frequently brings in extra characters to give the singers someone to act against–Leporello has a girlfriend in the opening, Donna Elvira gets a priest in “Mi tradi,” and a random servant girl appears repeatedly.  A commenter here already pointed out the concatenation of the Catalog Aria with Zerlina’s wedding, which is nicely done except for shorting out Donna Elvira.  There’s a monk praying through all of the final sextet, who I was expecting to be a reincarnated Don (because the Don dresses up as a monk in the church scene earlier), but nothing so interesting, he was just a monk.  Unfortunately I think this technique ended up being more a crutch than anything else.  And the ending, with its everpresent statue, has none of the crazy intensity that it needs (though Donna Elvira has apparently become a nun), and the descent to hell passes so quickly as to have very little impact. 

Sorry to say so much, but I feel like I had to to describe everything, because this production doesn’t organize itself into easily-summarized coherence.  It doesn’t ever develop any direction or guiding idea.  There’s stuff there, but what’s it all about? AAAHHHH! I DON’T KNOW!!!!

Musically, the highlight was the orchestra, which knows this score inside out and can play it without breaking a sweat.  But there were some conducting issues.  Franz Welser-Möst’s account was more shaped on the orchestral than vocal side, and had coordination issues with the stage.  The tempos tended to be odd, and the pacing lacked drama.  Unfortunately the singing was accomplished without being memorable.  Many of the arias were loud and unsubtle, the ensembles were better.  Appoggiaturas were in oddly short supply.  I prefer baritone Dons to basses, and while D’Arcangelo was perfectly fine, with a darkish lyric tone, he failed to seduce me.  Er, I mean, he’s no Erwin Schrott in the acting department, and didn’t show much in the way of seductive tendencies (and some of us may have found Leporello better-looking, sorry, I’m superficial).  I could have also used more vocal floating in the serenade.  It takes skills to sing the Champagne Aria and take your shirt off at the same time, though.

Donna Anna (Sally Matthews)

Alex Esposito was a vocally solid if not particularly outstanding Leporello, with a very good Catalog Aria and a lighter and higher-sounding tone than his master.  Their relationship didn’t go anywhere, though Esposito was a sparkier presence than D’Arcangelo.  The best of the women was Sally Matthews’s Donna Anna, whose cloudy, sometimes constrained soprano has a vaguely Gheorghiu-esque quality, though more pointed.  She took some time to warm up but gave a committed, grand performance with good coloratura and long phrases.  Roxana Constantinescu’s mezzo Donna Elvira was hindered by a wide vibrato and a lack of contrast and acting detail.  Sylvia Schwartz’s Zerlina was lyric and sweet but understated. Saimir Pirgu sang Don Ottavio with attractive tone but phrasing right out of Puccini, wringing every bit of drama and sentiment out of his two (yes we got both) arias and blasting every “-te” of “morte” in “Dalla sua pace.”   Albert Dohmen disappointed as the Commendatore, not sounding bass-like at all.  Except him, none of the principals were weak, but none really remarkable.

I think a few more tech rehearsals would have done this show good.  I wondered if someone was writing the lighting cues as they were giving them, because they were that bumpy and randomly timed.  Lights would abruptly change in the middle of scenes for no reason, making me suspect a cue was pages late or early.  The trip down to Hell went about three times too quickly and started a good two pages too late, severely screwing up the drama.  If you’re not going to get this kind of thing right at a new production prima, when are you going to?

There was rather a lot of booing at the end, particularly by generally-friendly Vienna standards, though there was also some enthusiastic cheering.  The consensus in the standing room was that it fell short of Wiener Staatsoper standards for both Mozart singing and staging.  “It would be OK for Zurich,” one Stehplatz member said.  “Or Germany.  But in Vienna?”  In my experience Zurich and Germany generally come up with something more interesting than this production-wise, but point taken.

We’re getting a full Da Ponte cycle from this production team.  The Figaro, already seen in Paris and already considered via DVD here, will premiere in February, the Così in two years’ time.

Also, typo in the cast list!  They misspelled “Masetto” as “Masseto”.

Bows–the statue is not THE statue, it is only A statue:

Production photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper, except the first one, copyright APA/Robert Jäger

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