Don Giovanni, opera review: The ENO rises triumphantly to this perennially challenging opera

This Don Giovanni offers a high-calibre cast and a couple of ingenious directorial twists, writes Barry Millington
Ingenious: The ENO rises to this perennially challenging opera
Robert Workman Photographer
Barry Millington3 October 2016

The figure of the amoral but irresistible philanderer flits down the centuries from well before Mozart and Da Ponte to James Bond and beyond. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, which features a narcissistic libertine who taunts God and threatens the very fabric of society, offers a perennial challenge to singers and directors alike. It’s one to which ENO rises triumphantly, in its new production by Richard Jones, with a high-calibre cast and an ingenious directorial twist or two.

Christopher Purves’ Giovanni, like his sidekick Leporello, is a sleazebag in a shiny black suit. Gallantry isn’t his style: more a sneering contempt for his victims. And Purves reminds us that you don’t need to be a dashing matinee idol to be a magnet for women: power, money and status are also powerful aphrodisiacs.

Jones plays with fire suggesting that Giovanni’s first victim, Donna Anna, is a consenting one with a taste for BDSM, though Kasper Holten went some of that way at Covent Garden two years ago. This Anna, the excellent Caitlin Lynch, has to simulate distress in her big first-act aria, Or sai chi l’onore, while that of the second act (Non mi dir) is a brilliant conception: it’s addressed to her betrothed, Don Ottavio, in a call-box, allowing Giovanni to make an obviously expected entry into her room – thus making complete sense, for once, of Anna’s desire to delay her marriage.

The Giovanni/Leporello partnership is a slick, hilarious double act by two seasoned ENO troupers, Purves and Clive Bayley. Purves’ line is not always as even as it might be, but the lethal cocktail of charm and menace is potently stirred. Bayley’s Leporello, lewd and insinuating rather than appealing of tone, is a classic Jones creation: his ginger wig alone plays a virtuoso role.

Five operas for beginners

1/5

Abetted by a wittily racy translation by Amanda Holden, it’s played as a black comedy with more of Jones’ trademark doors than ever. The orchestra’s accomplished playing of the overture – Mark Wigglesworth’s direction is taut but sensitive throughout – is all but sabotaged by an unduly repetitive mimed sequence showing lover and after – one of them a chap – robotically entering a door, being followed by Giovanni and exiting again. The surreal farce of much of the action elicits uneasy chuckles; certainly it’s all blocked and enacted with impressive precision.

Christine Rice, whose Elvira degenerates into a wild-eyed avenging fury, is in terrific voice. Allan Clayton’s neatly trimmed, besuited Don Ottavio is admirably impassioned. Nicholas Crawley and Mary Bevan are first-rate as Masetto and Zerlina. The Commendatore (a suitably stony-voiced James Creswell) is revealed as a hypocritically philandering war-hero and in a cleverly reinvented, secular finale this Giovanni is neither punished nor reformed. He’ll certainly be back.

Until Oct 26, London Coliseum; eno.org

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