Don Giovanni – review

The Royal Opera's schedule for the next couple of months is dominated by the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas, tacitly celebrating arguably the greatest composer-librettist collaboration in history. None of the productions is new, and proceedings opened with a revival by Duncan MacFarland of Francesca Zambello's 2002 staging of Don Giovanni, a problematic piece of theatre, hampered on occasion by Zambello's perennial equation of opera with grandeur.

MacFarland has injected considerable subtlety into some of it, most notably in his delineation of the growing froideur between Anna and Ottavio, and of the venality that lurks behind Leporello's obsequious attachment to Giovanni. But many irritations remain, not least the flaming hand of God that sends Giovanni to his doom, and the graveyard scene, prosaically cluttered with funeral mourners rather than eerily metaphysical and spacious.

The musico-dramatic emphasis, meanwhile, falls on the confrontation between Gerald Finley's Giovanni and Matthew Polenzani's tremendous Ottavio. Finley's performance isn't so much about raw sex as coolly calculated seduction. Polenzani, in contrast, is fiery in his morality, his self-control eroded by his frustrated, if monogamous passion for Hibla Gerzmava's Anna.

Elsewhere, you have to take the rough with the smooth. There's a shrill Zerlina from Irini Kyriakidou, while Katarina Karnéus makes heavy weather of Elivira's Mi Tradì. On the plus side, we have Gerzmava, who sings with laser-like accuracy, Lorenzo Regazzo's funny, embittered Leporello, and a forceful, strikingly handsome Masetto from Adam Plachetka. Conductor Constantinos Carydis hectors the opening a bit. But when he reaches the Anna-Ottavio duet, haste turns into excitement, and the rest of it is terrific.