The curtain rose during the overture to set the audience in somewhere urban and a bit dubious: Palermo or Naples perhaps, and maybe during a rubbish collectors’ strike. A drunk woman and a man (later seen to be Donna Anna and Don Giovanni) enter a nightclub. Leporello complains about his duties, a dishevelled Donna Anna erupts from the nightclub, and bang, NZ Opera’s production of Don Giovanni hurtles onto the stage of the Aotea Centre and doesn’t relax its grip for the next 3 hours. Graffitied facades of grand houses move around, pivoting to provide flexible spaces for parties, seductions and assaults. We are in the present day, surrounded by violence, as knives, guns and baseball bats are presented and used. All is recorded on smartphones.

And through this landscape wanders Mark Stone’s Don Giovanni, handsome and cheerfully amoral, dominating the opera. Mellifluous in his serenade, he was forceful elsewhere. Around him move the sleazy Leporello of Warwick Fyfe, Anna Leese’s volatile Donna Elvira and Lisa Harper-Brown’s steely Donna Anna. Harper-Brown made a real success of “Or sai chi l’onore” with shining high notes and some discreet decoration. In this production she is obviously lying to Jaewoo Kim’s Don Ottavio about the events leading to her father’s death, proved to Don Ottavio by a smartphone photograph. Amelia Barry’s delicious trollop of a Zerlina and Robert Tucker’s louring Masetto rounded out the main sextet, with Jud Arthur reliable as ever as the Commendatore. The Chapman Tripp chorus again demonstrated their skills in creating distinct characters, whether caterers, police, partygoers, prostitutes or thugs.

This was also a very funny Don Giovanni with a lot of rapport between the performers. The Zerlina/Masetto hen/stag party was like something out of a reality TV show, while the catalogue aria, complete with, yes, smartphone evidence of the Don’s conquests, evoked exactly the mixture of laughter and distaste that it should. Don Giovanni’s last supper party was kicked off with huge plates of breakfast cereal to cure the munchies. Some free translations shown in the surtitles (was the Don really referred to as a womanising pillock? And was Elvira pregnant?) added harmlessly to the fun.

Wyn Davies led a fleet, historically informed performance, with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra in a raised pit. This let all of Mozart’s lovely instrumental detail be heard along with some unfortunate first night flubs. There was a lovely touch where key string players stood during the party scene, allowing the three to be clearly distinguished. There was one large cut right at the end, where the final sextet consisted only of the allegro conclusion. But dramatically, this sustained momentum for the astonished audience, who had just seen Don Giovanni set alight by those he had wronged, and run blazing up a flight of stairs in lieu of being dragged to hell. The rake punished, indeed.