Op era Don Giovanni (Glyndebourne) Aida (Covent Garden)
Don pulls off a cracker
Rupert Christiansen
Ihave seen 19 productions of Don Gio- vanni in my life, and Deborah Warner's at Glyndeboume is the nearest I've found to a good one. It split the first-night audience furiously and I guess it will split the press: so much the better. God help Glynde- bourne if it only wants its Mozart as bland- ly in period and politely in tune as this year's revival of Le Nozze di Figaro.
Warner does not make any sensational relocation of the opera (as Peter Sellars did so crassly with his LA freeway version of Die ZauberflOte). There are no visible gim- micks, no constricting concepts in Hilde- gard Bechtler's sombrely beautiful designs, subtly lit by Jean Kalman. The action is dated neutrally, the cast dressed in simple contemporary clothes and pitched against abstract settings dominated by a mobile raised platform. The sense, vague but sug- gestive, is of a hard cold urban environ- ment devoid of any sort of morality beyond that of revenge and survival. What gets lost is the opera's class structure — the simple basic fact that Don Giovanni is an artiste, while Zerlina Masetto and Leporello are proles — but there is a significant gain in terms of clarity. A bunch of operatic char- acters become credible people: the Don himself a smoothie advertising agent, tak- ing what he likes when he likes and think- ing no further than the end of his dick; Elvira one of those Women Who Love Too Much, pitifully ready to take the Don back on any terms; Ottavio, for once not a stuffed shirt but a man genuinely left baf- fled and miserable by Anna's impenetrable frigidity; Zerlina and Masetto, nothing but a pair of gullible and harmless teenage kids.
At this level the production is rivetting and the performances are without excep- tion focused, precise and detailed. To see opera singers act and interact with such a degree of sensitivity and intelligence is a rare pleasure, and Warner must take great credit for coaxing them thus far. At other levels she is not so consistently successful. The mobile platform is at times a distrac- tion, and it creaked outrageously and unforgivably during the trio of the Masks. The muddle in the action at the end of Act One is not resolved (all would-be produc- ers of this opera should address themselves to my Patented Fail-Safe Answer to this problem). Presenting the Commendatore as a blood-stained revenant rather than a uom' di sasso creates more difficulties than it is worth, and I was embarrassed by the gratuitousness of the Don's final infatua- tion with a plaster effigy of the BVM — as if we needed to be told.
Other scenes were lucidly, even brilliant- ly executed: the opening, for instance, all B-movie hysteria, with the Don nastily strangling the Commendatore; or the last banquet, at which the Don cracks a horse- whip over a huge bare white table, not defi- ant, not fearful, just decadent beyond caring. No production of Don Giovanni ever quite adds up — like Hamlet, it is too richly imperfect and confused a text for anyone even to guess what its total might be — but this one certainly amounts to something serious, exciting and original.
The musical execution is superlative: and that shouldn't sound like a footnote. Once past a perversely hasty account of the over- ture, Simon Rattle's conducting was breathtakingly taut and febrile: young man's Mozart this, full of sexual energy and wit, the textures and harmonies thrillingly exposed in the playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment. In the title- role, Gilles Cachemaille delivered a melt- in-the-mouth legato that made 'La ci darem' an irresistible seduction. Hillevi Martinpelto was spot-on as Donna Anna, John Mark Ainsley managed to be both impassioned and poised as Ottavio, Rober- to Scaltriti a boldly positive Masetto. I am hopelessly in love with Amanda Roocroft and entirely unobjective as to her merits, but the roar at her curtain call indicated the existence of others who thought her Donna Elvira as dazzling and gorgeous as I did. Fine work too from Juliana Banse (Zerlina), Sanford Sylvan (Leoporello) and Gudjon Oskarsson (the Commendatore).
At the Aldeburgh Festival, Britten's Noye's Fludde, mother of all community operas, emerged rumbustiously in Lucy Bailey's amiable if shambolic staging, and Elena Prokina, radiant star of the Royal Opera's Katya Kabanova and Glynde- boume's Eugene Onegin, gave an impres- sive recital of Russian songs deep dyed in romantic melancholy. But I could endure only two hours of a four-hour concert per- formance of Handel's Tamerlano, gamely performed by students of the Britten-Pears School (notably led by a promising counter-tenor, Simon Clulow, in the title- role). It was desperately dull stuff, which made me think that now we have explored every nook and cranny of authentic perfor- mance practice, the time has come for a revival of authentic audience behaviour — arriving late, leaving early, chatting during the boring bits, snacks and bewies on sale throughout, perhaps even the odd outbreak of rotten orange throwing.
At Covent Garden, a second cast failed to lift Elijah Moshinsky's straightforward production of Verdi's Aida. A few hours of rehearsal might have helped. Nina Rautio (Aida) did some heavenly things in the Nile Scene ('Lit tra foreste vergini' was as ravish- ing as befits one of the composer's most heart-stoppingly beautiful inspirations), but didn't thrill us in Ritoma vincitor'. Dolora Zajick (Amneris) flung herself about vamp- ishly and hit the spot in the first scene of Act Four; unfortunately, her _rather cheer- ful demeanour didn't suggest the necessary Joan Crawford terribilita. The rest of the cast, including a valiant last-minute substi- tute Radames, was only so-so, and Edward Downes's conducting scarcely even that.
I wish the Almeida Opera well. It bravely commissions new chamber operas from a younger generation of composers and tries hard to stage them imaginatively and pro- mote them sensibly. It pains me therefore to admit that I found Elena Firsova's adap- tion of the Oscar Wilde fairy-tale The Nightingale and the Rose a thunderous clunker, completely devoid of theatricality, pace, contrast, charm or atmosphere. Bet- ter luck next time, chaps.
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