Don Giovanni

To be screened on Sunday 31 July 2011 at 6pm in Picture House Cinemas.

Don Giovanni Unmasked from Glyndebourne on Vimeo.

Suavely ruthless, Finley was both steely monster and molten charmer, singing with a firmness, clarity and stylistic elegance that I can’t easily imagine surpassed. The Telegraph

“Gerald Finley exactly captures the plastic nature of Mozart’s unrepentant hero/villain” The Wall Street Journal

Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Librettist: Lorenzo da Ponte
Venue and Dates: Glyndebourne Festival
4, 7, 9, 15, 18, 20, 23, 31 July
3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 20, 23, 27 August. [new production]
Conductor: Vladimir Jurowski (4 to 23 July)
Jakub Hrusa (31 July to end)
Director: Jonathan Kent (replacing Sam Mendes)
Designs: Paul Brown
Lighting: Mark Henderson
Movement Director: Denni Sayers
Performers:
Don Giovanni : Gerald Finley
Leporello : Luca Pisaroni
Donna Anna : Anna Samuil
Donna Elvira : Kate Royal
Don Ottavio : William Burden
Zerlina : Isabel Leonard
Masetto : Guido Loconsolo
Il Commendatore : Alastair Miles / Brindley Sherratt (July 18 – 31)

Notes: This production was broadcast by BBC2 TV on Christmas Eve 2010 at 2:45pm and was released as a DVD by EMI on 11 April 2011. Click DVD cover for details and how to order

Articles

Click the 2010 Glyndebourne Festival programme book cover below to read “The Ten Minute Bell” a short interview with Gerry

Click photo below to read an interview “The Don of all Giovannis”in the Times

Click below for an interview with the director, Jonathan Kent

Photo gallery

Photos by Bill Cooper / Tristan Kenton

What the critics say

Edward Seckerson, The Independent, 5 July 2010

Four stars

The crushing first chord of the Overture plunges us into darkness – a sudden and scarifying blackout.

Through the gloom of residual light we can just make out a slowly revolving cube, on each of its sides ornate masonry, an old erotic master, and a door. Is this the House of Giovanni? Or Pandora’s Box? Or both? Paul Brown’s truly amazing set for Jonathan Kent’s new Glyndebourne staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is – like the opera’s anti-hero – full of surprises. It opens, it unfolds, it conceals, it deviously transforms and eventually, inevitably, disintegrates.

But this visual stylisation is thrown into the sharpest relief with Kent’s naturalistic descent into a period where the rock n’roll of the Don’s privileged lifestyle will have seemed particularly enticing. For those with memories long enough to recall the late 1950s, the smell of sexual permissiveness was growing increasingly intense. “Kitchen sink” drama was the new sleaze. And Don G (the eternally suave Gerald Finley) was living it. A Polaroid photo of each sexual conquest (how cool and how sinister is that) helped him keep the memories alive. Instead of one little book of statistics his valet Leporello (the excellent Luca Pisaroni) maintained a selection of albums.

The success of Kent’s update entails the risky strategy of to some extent playing against the reckless dash of the narrative (brilliantly and dramatically underpinned by Vladimir Jurowski’s fizzing engagement with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and playing the recitative at conversational pace. And with Finley savouring the caress of his words as surely as that of his songs and his experienced touch, the pace was often quite languorous.

All of which made (according to your viewpoint) for a greater contrast and sense of heightened imperative with the musical numbers and the all-singing, all-dancing set – and for sure you couldn’t have wished for a more sizzling hike in temperature in the act one finale as an entirely unexpected premonition of hellfire and damnation devours the Don’s home a couple of hours ahead of schedule.

Jurowski’s choice of the Vienna edition gave Don Ottavio his ravishing “Dalla sua pace”, which William Burden sang decently but not exceptionally, and the elegant Kate Royal’s Donna Elvira (looking dazzlingly in period) got to brave “Mi tradi” with a compelling amalgam of breathless desire and desperation. Anna Virovlansky’s Zerlina was outstanding and her compatriot Anna Samuil – a touch of wildness in the vocal temperament – made quite a fist of Donna Anna’s challenging “Non mi dir”.

The last Polaroid of the evening was of the deceased Don – a souvenir to add to Leporello’s album and lasting evidence that you reap what you sow?

Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 5 July 2010

Tautness and leanness characterises Jonathan Kent’s staging of Mozart’s masterpiece

No director will ever come up with an entirely satisfactory reading of a masterpiece as complex and flawed as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but Jonathan Kent certainly gives the audience plenty to chew on.

His dark, chilly, hard-edged production, designed by Paul Brown, is focused round a spinning cube of corrugated brick wall, which opens up and disintegrates to reveal marble halls and mysterious de Chiricoesque colonnades. Costuming evokes that operatically over-ploughed terrain, Fellini’s black-and-white movies of the late 1950s: a smooth Don Giovanni in a sharp suit and sunglasses looks like Mastroianni in 8½.

Kent keeps the action moving and doesn’t mess about: tautness and leanness characterise the staging. Without being aggressively gimmicky, he has some good, fresh incidental ideas, too: the flames come for Giovanni at the end of Act 1 (via Masetto’s petrol can) rather than Act 2, the Commendatore isn’t a statue but a blood-stained corpse, and snow falls bleakly but beautifully during Giovanni’s serenade.

But I’m not sure quite how powerfully it would all register were it not for the superb double act of Gerald Finley and Luca Pisaroni as Giovanni and Leporello, master and servant.

Suavely ruthless, Finley was both steely monster and molten charmer, singing with a firmness, clarity and stylistic elegance that I can’t easily imagine surpassed. Pisaroni made a delightfully goofy but treacherous Leporello, both his master’s alter ego and his rival (you feel he’d happily turn Giovanni in for a small backhander.) Their crackling give-and-take in recitative was a joy: two guys with a dangerous hormonal overload, ready to turn any outrage into a laugh.

The women in the cast were much less interesting. Kate Royal wasn’t in best voice as Elvira – perhaps the role is just too big for her – and Anna Samuil’s Anna was cloudy in tone and unassertive in personality. Anna Virovlansky’s Zerlina was adequate, but there are plenty of young British sopranos who could have done as well.

Vladimir Jurowski conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with propulsive energy and his trademark attention to detail. His was an admirably precise and thoughtful account of the score, but not a particularly lovable or sensuous one. The rarely heard “Vienna” text was adopted, omitting Ottavio’s second aria and a section of the epilogue, but including an uninspired comic duet for Zerlina and Leporello in Act 2. To what end?

George Hall, The Stage, 5 July 2010

The visuals place us in the fifties, with prominent references to religious imagery and a graveyard where Alastair Miles’ murdered Commendatore returns as a decaying corpse that looks like something from Night of the Living Dead. The set becomes increasingly lopsided and cluttered as the evening goes on.

An overall problem is tone. Like many directors, Kent seems to view the piece as containing occasional comic scenes as opposed to being a comedy with some very serious interventions. Here there is rarely a laugh except when there’s a witty surtitle. Opportunities are missed to present Gerald Finley’s Don Giovanni and Luca Pisaroni’s Leporello as a comic double act, although the latter makes a fair attempt to be funny.

Finley’s Don is vocally strong but over-earnest – cool and handsome in his shades, he never really seems to be enjoying himself. Nor does Kate Royal’s Donna Elvira, who sounds stressed as well as, more understandably, looking it. Anna Samuil possesses a rich, substantial tone, well deployed in Donna Anna’s arias. William Burden’s Don Ottavio is on the dry side, but the peasant couple of Anna Virovlansky’s Zerlina and Guido Loconsolo’s Masetto are unfailingly perky and bright. With a hard-driven reading of the score from conductor Vladimir Jurowski, there’s genuine musical quality, though an essential thread within the piece has gone missing.

Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 5 July 2010

It started well enough, with a deliberately unannounced blackout and – bang! – those fearsome, fateful chords calling everyone to attention. The message was clear: this performance aimed to grip its audience and not let go. Good intentions, for sure, but from that point onwards, Glyndebourne’s first Don Giovanni in 10 years went steadily downhill until, early in the second act, Giovanni sang himself to sleep with the slowest Serenade in history, taking most of his audience with him. What on paper looked a sure winner – the director, Jonathan Kent, had talked of a “white-knuckle rollercoaster ride” – ended up looking and sounding extremely tame.

Mozart’s dramma giocoso is so open to interpretation, probably more than any other opera, that it can withstand virtually any setting. Noting that the piece was composed at a “hinge moment” in European social and cultural history, Kent updates the action to somewhere around 1960, a similarly potent “hinge-moment” with greater resonance today. The locale changes, too, from Da Ponte’s “city in Spain” to the Rome of Fellini and Fornasetti – a world of silver cigarette cases, 1950s fashions and street corners at night, in which Giovanni, a Mafioso-style psychopath in white tuxedo and scarf, finds a natural home. Paul Brown’s set, a revolving stone citadel with façades inspired by Piranesi and Giulio Romano, opens like a box of tricks, yielding all sorts of murky perspectives.

So far so sensible – but wasn’t life in 1960 rather innocent? Gerald Finley’s rapier-voiced Giovanni may have women gagging for him, but he is as threatening as Cliff Richard’s Bachelor Boy, and we end up feeling rather protective of him. Everyone else in Kent’s scenario behaves as they would in a run-of-the-mill production, rendering the change of setting curiously inert. At least in “traditional” productions there is a degree of wit. Here, the ensembles are as dull as Giovanni’s party, and we are left wondering why Act One ends with a cheap flame show and what the sustained snowfall means in Act Two. Barring the opening blackout, there’s not a single coup de théâtre, least of all in a cramped and complicated finale.

Glyndebourne misguidedly opts for the version Mozart provided for Vienna in 1788, a year after the Prague premiere. The little known Leporello-Zerlina duet in Act Two merely holds the action up, and the addition of Elvira’s ‘Mi tradì’ mercilessly exposes Kate Royal’s weaknesses: struggling to bulk up her voice, she sounds ragged and tremulous, and the characterisation is blank.

The omission of Ottavio’s second aria, by contrast, is a missed opportunity for William Burden, who rids the character of wimpishness and turns “Dalla sua pace”into a show-stopper. That’s the evening’s musical highlight, unless you count Luca Pisaroni’s wonderfully conversational way with the recitatives, lighting up the text in a way only an Italian can. Exactly which language Anna Samuil’s anodyne Donna Anna is singing is hard to tell, but Anna Virovlansky’s liberated Zerlina, more 1970 than 1960, is a hit and Guido Loconsolo makes a suitably oafish Masetto. Alastair Miles’s Commendatore is anonymous – another fault of the production. Barring the soporific Serenade, Vladimir Jurowski keeps the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on a tight leash but stops too often to let the audience applaud, undermining the intended rollercoaster effect. There are also problems of co-ordination with the offstage music, which jars with the 1960 setting. Glyndebourne has tried hard with this Don Giovanni, to little avail: Mozart’s masterpiece proves as elusive as ever.

Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 5 July 2010

With his new production of Don Giovanni for Glyndebourne, Jonathan Kent has achieved the near impossible. Out of what is one of the most dramatically compelling, psychologically complex and morally ambiguous operas ever written, he has created a nullity, an evening of such bland neutrality that anyone seeing Don Giovanni for the first time in this staging would be at a loss to understand why Mozart’s work is so highly regarded.

Kent’s approach is hard to fathom: why, for instance, does Don Giovanni’s house go up in flames at the end of the first act? The action is updated to somewhere in southern Europe in the 1970s or 80s, though Paul Brown’s monolithic set – a giant cube of forbidding grey walls, which moves around the stage and opens like a conjuror’s box to create different scenes and stage geometries – is less specific. There’s far too much of that expensive-looking shape changing, which becomes distracting when everything starts to move before a scene has finished. By the end it seems to tie itself in knots, creating a crazy jumble of slopes and angles that the characters negotiate as best they can.

At least that gives the cast something to do, because they spend little time fleshing out their performances. There’s no sense of relationships within this bunch, no social context, let alone a political or sexual one. Gerald Finlay’s cypher-like Giovanni moves between them quite anonymously. There’s no danger, let alone black humour – the bloody murder of the Commendatore (Alastair Miles) soon seems like an aberration – no hint of a sexual predator, just a man in a suit singing beautifully, with Luca Pisaroni’s Leporello as his bumbling sidekick. Little more emerges from the other protagonists – the relationship between Anna Samuil’s Donna Anna and William Burden’s Ottavio remains a puzzle, while Kate Royal’s Elvira doesn’t hang together at all. It’s left to Anna Virovlansky’s sparky Zerlina to shine like a good deed in a world that isn’t nearly naughty enough.

Vladimir Jurowski conducts efficiently, without ever hinting at the blazing theatricality of his best Glyndebourne work. He opts for the Vienna version of the score, so that Ottavio loses his second aria (no great loss when the first had been taken funereally slowly), but Elvira gets to sing Mi Tradi (rather heavy going for Royal), and Leporello and Zerlina have their silly second act duet. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the pit are all thoroughly respectable musically, if only there was any dramatic spark.

Barry Millington, Evening Standard, 6 July 2010

Rafael Nadal was not the only Spaniard savouring victory last night. A few miles south, in the new Glyndebourne production by Jonathan Kent, Gerald Finley’s Don Giovanni was also relishing his conquests.

Kent’s production inhabits an ingenious set by Paul Brown — classical façades revolving and unfolding, the dominant chiaroscuro sharply lit by Mark Henderson — that updates the action to within a few decades of the present day. The fracturing of that set is a powerful metaphor for moral collapse.

This Giovanni wears a white dinner jacket, possibly bringing his anti-social behaviour close to home for some: a member of the audience was overheard describing him as a “rotter”. Finley’s superbly sung and acted character is no lovable rogue, however. Both he and the production exude danger. From the electrifying opening, through Giovanni’s neck-risking clambering outside Donna Anna’s window, to the hell-portending fires that break out at the close of Act 1 and on to the final supper table, the staging underlines the philanderer’s demonic aspect.

Luca Pisaroni’s admirably sung Leporello captures his master’s victims — and in an ultimate act of retributive justice the dead Giovanni himself — with a Polaroid camera. The tragically doomed passion of Kate Royal’s Donna Elvira is brilliantly captured in the sad clown’s costume she wears to the party. The would-be hero, Don Ottavio, cleanly sung by William Burden, wears an ego-boosting soldier’s uniform.

Under the direction of Vladimir Jurowski, conducting the work for the first time, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment produces sonorities both pungent and tender. Jurowski screws the tension tightly but allows for moments of calm melancholy, as in the mandolin-accompanied serenade of Giovanni — the snowfall and unsettling stage action hinting at the emptiness of the dissolute life.

Richard Morrison, The Times, 6 July 2010

 The good news is that this new Don Giovanni includes one stunningly virtuosic performance. The bad news is that it is delivered by the scenery. I don’t know what the designer Paul Brown was on when he created it. But I want some.

Unfortunately it upstages, literally and metaphorically, everything else in Jonathan Kent’s production – even Gerald Finley in the title-role. Brown has created a house-sized box with a giant Classical portrait on one side and a Renaissance portico on the other. But this is a box like nothing else you’ve ever seen – certainly not in Mozart. It revolves through 360 degrees and unfurls to reveal tableaux that are produced like rabbits from a conjuror’s hat from a town piazza to Giovanni’s debauched salon (replete with a vast drawing of satyrs doing unprintable things to a maiden) and a supper scene with the table set on such a vertiginous slope that we seem to be observing Giovanni’s last meal from above.

Oh, and at the Act I curtain the set spectacularly catches fire (a foretaste, perhaps, of the inferno awaiting the Don in hell), while in Act II it gradually breaks apart, presumably symbolising Giovanni’s world shattering under the gathering onslaught of those he has raped, affronted or murdered.

Yes, the whole concept is blatantly attention-grabbing, And in Act II the singers seem as worried about standing upright on the steeply raked platforms, or not concussing themselves on the struts, as they are about delivering their arias. But at least Brown’s audacious designs bring something unexpected and exciting to the party. I’m afraid that, on the whole, the cast doesn’t.

Of course Finley is accomplished. His sardonic pointing of recitative; his suave seduction of Anna Virovlansky’s pert Zerlina; the flashes of psychopathic anger; the dark force of his baritone when fully unleashed – all this is good But has he played the role too often? The demonic drive seems diluted in this laid back portrayal. And his intonation slips uncharacteristically in Deh vieni.

Kate Royal’s Donna Elvira and Anna Samuil’s Donna Anna both look delicious in Brown’s La Dolce Vita-style 1950s costumes. But Royal struggles to muster enough venom, and indeed enough volume, while Samuil  - a Russian with Wagnerian power – sings too blandly to convey any sense of vengeance. Most of the energy on stage comes from Luca Pisaroni’s seedy but I superbly animated Leporello.

Then there is Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting. In the overture he obtains such fervent playing and sinuous sounds from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment that one’s heart leaps with anticipation. But later his speeds become increasingly lethargic. The big sextet is more like a big sleep. More vim and vigour all round, and this would be a show worthy of its scenery.

Warwick Thompson, Bloomberg, 8 July 2010

Jonathan Kent’s production of “Don Giovanni” at Glyndebourne is less successful. He sets the action in the operatically overworked era of 1950s Italy, and dresses the characters in tailored suits, dark glasses and wide skirts.

The narrative is clear, and the action slick. For all that, it lacks bite. Paul Brown’s set, a revolving gray cube that opens in different configurations to reveal a church, a graveyard and a dining room, promises more than it delivers. Once the sides have swung out a few times, the changes then feel less and less fresh. The ending brings no surprises. No flames, no set transformation, nothing: Just a slow trapdoor descent for the Don and Commendatore.

Gerald Finley (Don Giovanni) transcends everything with his beautiful voice and creates a lively relationship with Leporello (Luca Pisaroni). The rest of the relationships feel underpowered, although Kate Royal (Elvira) and Anna Virovlansky (Zerlina) sing attractively. Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting zips along pleasantly.

If there’s nothing to scare the horses in Kent’s traditional approach, there’s not enough to excite them either.

Paul Levy, The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2010

There are two authentic versions of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard thought was “the perfect, unblemished” work of art. In its new production, Glyndebourne uses the fuller, 1788 Vienna version, with its weird duet for Leporello and Zerlina, whose coarse humor (bondage and other intimations of kinky sex) must have been omitted in the staging Kierkegaard saw.

In almost every other respect, however, Jonathan Kent’s production, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, designed by Paul Brown and stunningly lit by Mark Henderson, lives up to the Danish philosopher’s high opinion of Mozart and Da Ponte’s treatment of the tale of the sociopathic serial rapist and murderer (as we’d diagnose the don today).

Gerald Finley exactly captures the plastic nature of Mozart’s unrepentant hero/villain, whose style of music alters so that he is courageous with the Commendatore, comic with Leporello, courtly with Donna Anna and condescending to the peasant girl, Zerlina. Yet Mr. Finley is capable of singing his serenade, “Deh vieni alla finestra” in a heart-melting near-whisper that almost persuades you of his sincerity.

The production opens while the audience is still chattering in the darkened auditorium, so the first chord is as startling as a clap of thunder; and the special effects in this production aren’t confined to the auditory. There is more fire than I can remember seeing on an opera stage before.

Luca Pisaroni is a Leporello who achieves his comedy through effective body language and has a rich bass-baritone when he’s being solemn. Anna Samuil’s Donna Anna saved up everything for her final aria, which paid off in her solid coloratura passages. Mozart and Da Ponte were conscious that they were treading a very thin line between the comic and the serious. All the nuance and subtlety of this tension is present in Mr. Kent’s sublime staging, which should become a Glyndebourne classic.

William Hartston, Daily Express, 9 July 2010

When a director tries to stamp his mark on a classical opera with a striking new production, the result is often less than satisfactory.

Pointless updating, a change of location and elaborate sets can all detract from the music, singing and acting, which are, after all, what opera is really about.

Jonathan Kent’s reinvention of Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne, however, is magnificent.

Far from being the usual caddish womaniser, Don Giovanni appears as a despicably evil character, a rapist and murderer who will let nothing get in the way of his pursuit of women.

Gerald Finley sings the role in a wonderfully sneering manner from the opening moment when he swings out through a window and climbs down a building where he has just assaulted Donna Anna.

He fights with her father, the Commendatore (Alastair Miles) and kills him, not in the usual manner – a civilised sword fight – but in an unseemly brawl which ends with Don Giovanni beating the old man’s head in with a stone. At the end, the dead Commendatore comes back to drag Don Giovanni off to hell, not as a statue but as a zombie rising from its grave.

The darkness of this production is enhanced by gloomy lighting and a wondrous set, consisting of a huge cube rotated to present different sides to the audience, which also opens up to reveal dining rooms, courtyards or graveyards.

The singers perform with vigour and Anna Samuil as Donna Anna almost steals the show with her beautifully clear and powerful voice. Although the humour is played down, Luca Pisaroni as Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello, displays great comic talent.

One tiny gripe: conductor Vladimir Jurowski sometimes gives a rather indistinct beat. More than once the singers and orchestra seemed to be in danger of losing touch with each other, though Jurowski quickly got them back under control.

Anna Picard, The Independent, 11 July 2010

More than 200 years after their premiere, the sulphurous opening chords of Don Giovanni still shock.

As Glyndebourne’s auditorium is plunged into darkness, with a single spotlight on conductor Vladimir Jurowski, director Jonathan Kent shows us what lies in wait for Mozart’s murderous libertine. Here is retribution and damnation, a black void in which the stone guest is moving ever nearer, his tread heard in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s rasping brass and hollow kettledrums, the wraiths of other victims traced in the icy scales of the woodwind. Here too, unhappily, is the most impactful image of this production.

Run Kent’s Don Giovanni backwards and it would be a corker, the exploded angles and vertiginous rakes of Paul Brown’s bravura set slowly folding in to form the dusty mausoleum seen in the allegro of the overture. The bloodied skull of Alastair Miles’s Act I Commendatore is scarier than the suppurating zombie of the graveyard scene. Even the hellfire is misplaced, as Guido Loconsolo’s copper-voiced ox of a Masetto ignites the Don’s palace at the close of Act I. Brown’s glamorous 1950s costumes keep the social and sexual mores intact, yet Kent’s take on this most difficult of works remains unclear, the balance between comedy and tragedy uncertain.

Psychopathic from the start, Gerald Finley’s suavely sung Don fails to convey any lust for life or lust for lust. With the exception of Luca Pisaroni’s voluble, amoral Leporello and Kate Royal’s fragile, tender Donna Elvira, the characterisations are as unsympathetic as the singing is polished. Anna Samuil’s Donna Anna looks and sounds as hard as nails, while Anna Virovlansky’s brittle, bottle-blonde Zerlina is left to sing “Vedrai carino” alone. William Burden’s reticent Don Ottavio is deprived of “Il mio tesoro” in the 1788 edition, but stretches “Dalla sua pace” to compensate. The most exciting performance comes from Jurowski and the OAE, who make those chords blaze with horror.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 11 July 2010

On the subject of black holes, no one ends up in one blacker or more chasmic than Don Giovanni, Mozart’s rake who is swallowed up by hell. Glyndebourne’s new production, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski and with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, began with a big bang: literally, in the form of the solemn opening chords of the overture. In his first Don Giovanni, Jurowski spun vivid timbres from the period instrument ensemble, with delicate colours in the fortepiano-dominated recitative accompaniments. Tempi were brisk, with a sense of momentum carried from one aria to another, to the last bar.

All in the pit was more assured than the action on stage. Directed by Jonathan Kent, who takes a somewhat cool approach, the production is set in the late 1950s. Paul Brown’s revolving, rusticated box set creates a keen sense of the haphazard as all collapses in on itself, but it spins a few distracting times too often. The flames, providing excitement before the dinner interval, come too early making the end low key instead of electrifying.

The women look good, straight out of Fellini, but are undercharacterised, and none hits the mark musically. Kate Royal remains too sensible to convey the tempestuous obsession of Donna Elvira, the kind of woman who would not stop at cutting off a man’s trouser legs. Her insane, vengeful “Mi tradi” should personify dark matter. Royal isn’t there yet but, as with Anna Samuil’s Donna Anna and Anna Virovlansky’s Zerlina, she gives an assured performance which will develop as the run continues.

The men provide more grit. William Burden’s Don Ottavio turns the delicate “Dalla sua pace” into a show of muscularity. Luca Pisaroni shuns that annoying wink-wink tendency which afflicts some Leporellos in favour of a sardonic charm, competitive with that of his master. As for Gerald Finley, an irresistible Mastroianni lookalike, vulgar in white tux with slicked back hair, he sang the Don with customary intelligence and expression. You can see why Zerlina weakened. Was he just too nice?

One moment in particular stood out: his serenade, as he comes close to his own cataclysm, was controversially but convincingly slow and lingering. Like Icarus he is at the precipice, and time passes sensuously slowly. This opera should leave you burnt to a frazzle; horrified by man’s immorality and greed, flabbergasted by the intricate layers of plot and character, above all bewitched by the music’s sublime invention.

Carolyn Robertson, Mid Sussex Times, 15.7.2010

LIVE only for the present and pure pleasure and to hell with the consequences. It is the mantra of Don Giovanni, the cad and libertine, and yet it continues to appeal in Mozart’s most challenging of operas.
At Glyndebourne, deep in the heart of Sussex countryside and on a sublime summer’s evening, this was an uplifting experience for all its underlying darkness.
From the off, Don Giovanni went at a romping pace with an illicit sexual encounter followed by a daring escape, a bare-fisted murder and a consequential out-pouring of a daughter’s uncontrolled grief, all within the opening minutes of the first scene

And from the start Gerald Finley in the lead role was magnetic, with the body language of a rake, an arrogant scoundrel, indifferent to social acceptability or finer feelings, female or male.

The Canadian bass-baritone seemed utterly at home, musically, in the role, as if it had been written for him, and even without a great aria of his own, he made Don Giovanni the flawed character one always hoped would be redeemed.

The end was inevitable, of course, with a marvellous Commendatore rising from the grave to take him to hell asunder, the haunting voice of bass Alistair Miles powering over the Don like no earthly force could.

This whole performance by the Glyndebourne Festival Opera was a tour de force that surpassed all that I, for one, have seen in London.

It was impossible to relax as every soloist touched brilliance and sent tingles down the spine, garnished perhaps by the honey-tinted tones and grandeur of the opera house interior and the serenity of the exterior that seemed at its best in this balmiest of all summers.

What was also most captivating was another of Glyndebourne’s renowned sets, this time a giant cube whose double sides opened one by one and in every combination to create a church here, a ball room there, street scenes, courtyards and graveyards.

It was simplicity at its most complex and ingenious in its multitude of transformations that slid together and apart and back together again with deceptive ease.

But scenery apart, it was always the captivating singing that made this production so memorable. The Venezuelian-born Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni was brilliant as the put upon and laconic Leporello whose humour alternated with sulkiness, while Russian soprano Anna Samuil was aristocratic in the role of Donna Anna alongside the subdued charm of her rightful suitor and the opera’s only tenor role, Don Ottavio, performed to perfection by the American William Burden.

The other soloists Anna Virovlansky and Guido Loconsolo as Zerlina and Masetto, both tormented by the duplicity of Don Giovanni, completed the international line-up that added to the already glamourous occasion and they, too, could not have been bettered.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni continues throughout Glyndebourne’s 2010 season alongside Billy Budd, Cosi Fan Tutte, Macbeth, Hansel and Gretel and The Rake’s Progress.

Mike Reynolds, Musicalcriticism.com, 14 August 2010

The line-up looks outstanding.  Vladimir Jurowski, Glyndebourne’s music director, conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.  Don Giovanni looked like the must-see production of 2010 and was, indeed, an absolute sellout to Glyndebourne members before the turn of the year.   It will be revived, very promptly, for the 2011 Festival.

And there are, indeed, many wonderful aspects to this production (being filmed, the night I was there, for DVD).   It sounds glorious, the OAE responding to Jurowski’s beautifully crafted conducting with absolute precision, wonderful internal balance and at times inspired playing.   Tempi, however fast, never sound rushed, dynamic markings in the score are observed punctiliously, the sweep and momentum of number succeeding number is maintained through the inspired series of musical archways that Mozart constructs to link his dramma giocoso into one extraordinary whole.  It also looks a million dollars in Paul Brown’s multi-purpose design, the enormous cube on a central turntable whizzing round like the wheel of fate, each side being lowered in turn to reveal ever-changing perspectives within – a church, a roofscape, the Don’s supper table (propped up one end at a crazy angle and eventually thrown over by the host to reveal the zombie-like Commendatore beneath).  It is handsomely (although not very imaginatively) costumed and in the course of the evening there is plenty of fine singing.  So why has the general critical reaction been so muted, and in some cases so downright dismissive of Kent’s production?

Perhaps we can work towards answering that question by considering first the quality of the singing and acting performances, starting with the character on whose assumption of the role so much depends – Don Giovanni himself, sung with honey-toned, clean precision by Gerald Finley.  His sense of line is faultless, his musical attack always right on the beat (or the off beat, as occasionally happens in this score).  Nothing fazes him, his singing of his showpiece arias such as Finch han dal vino is as apparently effortless as a technical warm-up, his voice always warm and noble in tone.  And there perhaps is a clue as to why, as a whole, his performance as the Don makes less of an impression than that of many a less gifted singer I have seen in the role – Finley is perhaps too nice, too mellifluous, too much in control of his material.  It may seem perverse to cavil at such a technically perfect performance, but I found myself longing for a rougher, darker side to the character than Finley was able – or was minded – to give us.  As a result, there was an obvious lacuna at the heart of the opera.

By contrast, Luca Pisaroni as his henchman and servant Leporello made a strong impression from the moment he first emerged from the door to Donna Anna’s house (although why he was in underpants and vest at that particular moment continues to baffle me, unless it was intended to convey a general atmosphere of licentiousness).  His voice is big and expansive, his stage personality warm and engaging.  The Catalogue aria was not perfect technically and stage business occasionally detracted from his vocal line, but the audience warmed to this Leporello and he received a richly deserved ovation at the end.  What came through was character, both vocal and dramatic, and character in an opera like Don Giovanni counts for a lot.

Character of a different sort was also on display from Anna Virovlansky as a blonde bombshell Zerlina, looking for all the world like a young Marilyn Monroe but singing like a completely assured Pamina or Sophie, with a lovely sheen to the voice and a soubrettish timbre just to remind us how young the simple peasant girl is whom she is portraying.  Batti batti was pure delight, simple and direct but ardent and sexy at the same time.  Perfect in the role, she is a find in her first appearance at Glyndebourne.

As Donna Anna, the initial object of Don Giovanni’s lust and one of the instruments of his eventual damnation, Anna Samuil gave a well-characterized performance without ever – quite – hitting the vocal heights.  She has an incisive dramatic soprano and did nothing wrong all evening, projecting her vocal line forcefully in the ensemble passages, but I neither warmed nor thrilled to her as I have to some great Donna Annas in the past.  Opposite her, William Burden was as steady and as foursquare as Don Ottavio is supposed to be.  I liked his full, open tenor sound and he rode the orchestration given to his set pieces (in the Vienna revision given by Glyndebourne we lose quite a chunk of the role) with ease, but the part, it has to be said, is often a thankless one and Burden brought no special insights, vocal or dramatic, to it.

That leaves us with the least satisfactory vocal performance of the evening, all the more disappointing because the very opposite had been much anticipated: that of Kate Royal in the pivotal role of Donna Elvira.  For much of the evening, she simply looked and sounded tentative.  Her costumes were drab and unbecoming, her stage blocking and movement completely at variance with the avenging woman possessed of Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s imaginations.  Anyone who has heard Royal elsewhere will know that she can both act and sing much better than this, so the verdict must simply be that she was badly miscast in the role.  As it was, tonal bloom and vocal firepower were both lacking, a big handicap for the character who has to convince us that she has got the measure of the Don and does not intend to allow him to elude her clutches.

So how and why does the production fail to stack up as an integrated, well conceived Don Giovanni?  My first criticism is that it is simply too monumental, the central (and brilliantly ingenious) cube somehow sapping energy from the performers onstage, actually slowing things up rather than facilitating the seamless transition from scene to scene.   The music has irresistible onward force, the progression of scenes should be linear: we are for the most part in that indeterminate space between buildings, between rooms, as the Don heads on breathlessly towards his doom.  Well, somehow a turntable set fails to give us that, we are rooted to one spot in the designer’s imagination, and even as we admire the ingenuity and the stagecraft of it all, we lose dramatic momentum.  So the brilliant effect of plunging the house lights into total darkness as the great D minor chord launches the overture is dissipated as we, metaphorically, stay where we are as the stage action unfolds.  It all just feels too heavy, too contrived.

As the show runs on – particularly on tour this autumn – I am sure it will gather pace around the edges. As said at the outset, there are many fine things in it, to be admired and enjoyed.   But as the overwhelming theatrical experience that Don Giovanni ought to be, it is lacking. A case for once where the sum of the parts failed to make a satisfactory whole.