Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Music Review

Bad Boy in New Clothes: Seduction Still Stymied

"Don Giovanni": Ildar Abdrazakov has the title role in a production of this Mozart work that is returning to the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Metropolitan Opera’s disastrously dreary production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” was dead on arrival at its premiere in 2011.

The treatment of the overture said it all. The curtain went up, and while the orchestra burbled, the audience stared, for what felt like many minutes, at a wall of dimly lighted Spanish-style balconies. With those balconies continuing to loom like a steroidal Advent calendar over the rest of the opera, the chilly, detached performances struggled to make an impact.

Sometimes a few months and a cast change can stir up something in a show that does not immediately impress. In recent years this was happily the case with Luc Bondy’s initially reviled, eventually accepted Met version of Puccini’s “Tosca.”

And sometimes not.

The Met’s “Don Giovanni,” originally directed (if that is the word) by Michael Grandage and revived (if that is the word) on Wednesday evening, still fails to create excitement or interest. With leaden conducting by Edward Gardner, the talented music director of London’s English National Opera, the production is a long, lethargic evening, an operatic black hole that sucks the air out of the cavernous Met and a young, capable cast.

The audience was left with more questions than answers.

Why was the bass Ildar Abdrazakov, so formidable in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina” last February, utterly unable to command the stage in his first Met performance of the Don? He had the notes but sounded and seemed tired, as impassively statuelike as the stone Commendatore that comes to life at the end.

When did the soprano Emma Bell, a luminous Countess for her Met debut in Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro” in 2009, become so strident? Her Donna Elvira had some floating moments but far more harried ones.

Why was the soprano Susanna Phillips, seen at the Met as a rising star, so maddeningly inconsistent as Donna Anna? She was sometimes sweetly straightforward and sometimes, particularly when agility was required, awkward and brittle, qualities that also defined the charmless Zerlina of Ekaterina Siurina.

Who at the Met thought that now was the time to give a major role like Don Ottavio to the blandly competent tenor Charles Castronovo, who was last at the company singing tiny parts more than a decade ago? And who allowed the rough, nearly inaudible bass David Soar, making his Met debut as Masetto, to go onstage at all?

How was Erwin Schrott, the amiable and resonant bass who sang Leporello, so much more vibrant and engaged when I saw him do the role in July at the Staatsoper in Berlin?

That last question, at least, is easily answered.

In Berlin Mr. Schrott was part of Claus Guth’s thoughtful, complex production of the opera, a desperately funny, melancholy and evocative take on the work set in a moodily realistic forest glen. The cast responded to Mr. Guth’s ideas with performances of power and nerve.

That was a production that could make an opera company proud. Mr. Grandage’s “Don Giovanni,” on the other hand, remains a show that the Met should be ashamed of.

“Don Giovanni” runs through Dec. 20 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Bad Boy in New Clothes: Seduction Still Stymied. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT