Mozart elation: Don Giovanni at the ROH
Don Giovanni
Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Stalls Circle D51 standing, £13
8 October 2019
ROH page
I was somewhat despairing of myself for having bought tickets to the Royal Opera’s umpteenth revival of Don Giovanni. I love Mozart’s opera dearly – it was almost my sole listening for most of my teenage years – but Kasper Holten’s 2014 production has always got my goat, with its counter-musical, counter-dramatic changing of the story and its general ugliness.
Reader, I must have mellowed. Changing the ending, so Don Giovanni is not visited by a real ghost but only by his self-loathing, and not taken into hell but only left in the ‘torment of his own loneliness’, is still cloth-eared. But otherwise the things that aggravate me in this production I found now largely ignoreable, and there was so much to give pleasure in the musical performance that I left elated.
This is not to say that musically it was perfect. Stage and pit regularly parted ways, conductor Hartmut Haenchen unable either to move self-indulgent singers along or temper the orchestra to their demands. Soprano Myrtò Papatanasiu as Donna Elvira is a sorry replacement for the indisposed Christine Rice – decently in-tune, pleasant in ensembles, but lacking the welly to juice Elvira’s fabulous arias. And as seems to be customary with the Royal Opera, the Commendatore, Petros Magoulas, was a decent singer but without the earth-shaking sonority such a role deserves.
Otherwise the cast was strong, and, aside from that tendency to drag, superbly stylish with Haenchen. Roberto Tagliavini made a robust Leporello and Malin Byström, while she bothers me still in seeming always to hold something back, at moments sounded glorious. My heart went without reservation to Erwin Schrott as Don Giovanni, Daniel Behle as Don Ottavio and Louise Alder as Zerlina. I had expected to find Schrott over-swaggery, as I had at Faust in the summer but actually he was just a charming delight, and in superb voice. Behle has a trademark of incredibly elegant soft sostenuto and he deployed it here to great effect – what a joy to hear Ottavio sung with such sophistication. And Alder is an ideal Zerlina, her bright soubrette gloriously in tune, perfectly balanced and gleaming.
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