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Don Giovanni, Opera North, Leeds – Seven magazine review
Mozart's Don Giovanni is a notoriously hard opera to direct – something confirmed by Alessandro Talevi's end-of-the pier production for Opera North
Portraying the last day in the life of a serial seducer, Don Giovanni is one of opera’s most hectic masterpieces. As such, the last thing that Mozart and Da Ponte’s dramma giocoso needs is an elegant staging, but a recent parade of messy productions has only confirmed this notoriously difficult work’s reputation as a director’s graveyard.
Sadly, the latest to fall victim to its curse is the talented young director Alessandro Talevi, who after a successful Turn of the Screw for Opera North has returned to Leeds for this much tougher challenge.
He trips up early and recovers only in time to bring some focus to the Supper Scene, which is far too late. Don Giovanni is a very long opera, and feels even longer if you spend the evening searching in vain for a directorial point of view.
Talevi appears hamstrung by the claustrophobic sets of his regular designer, Madeleine Boyd, and it would be interesting to see where other collaborators could take him.
For now, this Don Giovanni is stuck at the end of a pier, with a Punch and Judy theme that gives this performance (sung in Italian by a British cast) a rather confusing English slant: in the circumstances, Alastair Miles’s vocally strong but whiskery Leporello makes some sense, though William Dazeley’s uncharismatic Don Giovanni is still too genteel.
Turning Masetto’s group of vengeance-bent peasants into a group of snorting pigs, and trying to enliven Don Ottavio’s goody two-shoes image by having him steal from the Commendatore’s corpse, are ideas that are never followed through – despite potentially interesting costuming that tries to tell a tale of Fifties plebs versus Victorian toffs.
As the woman who really loves Giovanni, Donna Elvira (the bright-toned Elizabeth Atherton) seems to bridge both worlds.
When the best singing in Don Giovanni comes from Zerlina, here the sparky Claire Wild, something is wrong, and indeed Meeta Raval’s Donna Anna sounds distressingly squally. Tobias Ringborg enforces good Mozartian values in the pit.
At Leeds to Nov 1, then touring to Nov 24, www.operanorth.co.uk
This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph.
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