Don Giovanni, Royal Opera House, review

Having failed to endear himself to the Covent Garden public with a fussy and pretentious Eugene Onegin, Kasper Holten, the Royal Opera’s director, redeems himself with a more grounded version of Mozart’s most problematic drama. Its virtues start with Es Devlin’s handsome set — a slowly revolving cube depicting the interior and exterior of a many-chambered plantation-style mansion — and Anja Vang Kragh’s imaginative costuming, which locates the period around 1840.

Within this frame, Holten directs meticulously: the staging has been rehearsed with exceptional thoughtfulness and attention to detail. The pace is sure, and characterisations and relationships are sharply but subtly drawn.

There are intriguingly glossed suggestions that Anna and Giovanni are complicit throughout — Ottavio their pathetic patsy — and that Giovanni’s fate is not to be dragged down to hell by pantomime demons but simply to be left in existential confrontation with himself.

I was less enamoured of Luke Hall’s video, which busily projects the scrawled contents of Leporello’s catalogue all over the stage to swiftly diminishing effect, and I positively deplore the unmusicality of a large cut to the final scene which has been made to ram home the point of Giovanni’s isolation.

Even more objectionable is the jokey and clunking fortepiano continuo played by the conductor Nicola Luisotti, who otherwise leads the orchestra in a brisk reading of the score, short on power and grandeur but long on wit and grace.

An interesting polyglot cast successfully combines familiar and unfamiliar names. Mariusz Kwiecien presents a wearily sardonic sleazebag of a Giovanni, lacking in electrifying sexual energy, but a plausible seducer and reprobate none the less. He sang without affectation, crisply popping the cork in the Champagne aria and coating the Serenade in creamy legato.

His Leporello, Alex Esposito, made a splendidly seedy and lugubrious foil, with Dawid Kimberg’s dogged Masetto biting forcefully at his heels and Alexander Tsymbalyuk a blackly implacable Commendatore. Antonio Poli was an appropriately stuffed shirt of an Ottavio, singing both arias with fine poise, clean tone and exemplary enunciation.

Lucid Italian wasn’t, however, a quality offered by Malin Byström’s intermittently shrill Anna or Véronique Gens’ broad-brush Elvira, yet both sopranos offered wholeheartedly engaged performances. Best of all was Elizabeth Watts’ ditsy Zerlina — perhaps the most purely captivating aspect of an invigorating if uneven evening.

Until Feb 24. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; www.roh.org.uk