Review: Glynebourne Festival Opera's production of Don Giovanni
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.
l 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.
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Weather for Lewes
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
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