Don Giovanni – review

Mozart's opera has often been perceived as a graveyard for directors. If Scottish Opera's production avoids some of the more obvious pitfalls other recent stagings have stumbled into, much of the credit must go to Thomas Allen's vast experience of the title role, which, as a singer, he virtually owned internationally for a decade and more.

The baritone-turned-director's overview of the piece turns out to be relatively traditional. Simon Higlett's complex designs, evocatively lit by Mark Jonathan, conjure up a dreamlike 18th-century Venice – the city from which Lorenzo da Ponte was banished for immoral activities before he became Mozart's librettist, and where his associate, Casanova – who may have attended the opera's premiere in Prague in 1787 – began his libidinous career. The classic scenario of the serial seducer whose violence and sexual rapacity eventually bring divine retribution finds an apt historical frame in the handsome costumes and period setting.

Allen also discovers a way to move successfully back and forth between the serious and comic elements, which are notoriously hard to negotiate, though not all his gestures are orthodox, and some don't entirely work. When Giovanni slays the Commendatore, his grabbing of Leporello's knife-wielding hand makes the servant as much a murderer as his employer. Though the idea is not fully followed through, the relationship between Jacques Imbrailo's suave, mellifluous Giovanni and Peter Kalman's downcast Leporello feels unusually complicit. The ghost of Jóhann Smári Sævarsson's substantial if woolly Commendatore, meanwhile, briefly spies on the guilty pair before making his traditional reappearance as a singing statue in the graveyard scene. More crucially, the dramatic high point of the act one finale, where Giovanni's anarchic sexual misrule reaches its apogee, is neither sufficiently exhilarating or threatening.

Yet there's a general sharpness of outline to the individual performances that allows an ongoing sense of engagement and interaction. Lisa Milne's expert singing offers Donna Elvira dignity in her constant harrying of Giovanni while not disguising the fact that her chase is as self-deceiving as it is futile. The sparring between Anna Devin's manipulative Zerlina and Barnaby Rea's borderline abusive Masetto is neatly sketched in. Although Ed Lyon cannot make decent-but-dull Don Ottavio magnetic, he does provide genuine highlights with his muscular delivery of the two famous arias. Stepping in for an indisposed Susan Gritton, Anita Watson makes a more than creditable Donna Anna. In her Scottish Opera debut, conductor Speranza Scappucci allows space for Mozart's vocal lines to blossom while astutely conveying the internal richness of the orchestral drama.