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| Leporello (Clive Bayley) and Don Giovanni (Christopher Purves) Images: (c) Robert Workman |
Coliseum
(sung in English)
Don Giovanni – Christopher Purves
Commendatore – James Creswell
Donna Anna – Caitlin Lynch
Don Ottavio – Allan Clayton
Donna Elvira – Christine Rice
Leporello – Clive Bayley
Masetto – Nicholas Crawley
Zerlina – Mary Bevan
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: James Henshaw)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Mark Wigglesworth (conductor).
Richard Jones (director)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Sarah Fahie (movement)
A perfect staging of Don Giovanni is too much to hope for,
especially when the ‘traditional’ conflation of Prague and Vienna versions is
employed. Perfection is reserved for Mozart, of course, although Da Ponte does
not do badly at all here. But the opera in any case does not have the absolute dramatic
perfection of the other two Mozart Da Ponte operas; its greatness, like that of
Wagner’s operas, lies partly in the impossibility of the challenge it sets.
Even Don Giovanni himself, after all, fails to live up to the expectations voiced
in the Catalogue Aria; or at least he usually does.
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| Don Ottavio (Allan Clayton) and Donna Elvira (Christine Rice) |
That said, so many stagings
fail so dismally, that it is a great pleasure to welcome one that (mostly)
convinces as a piece of intelligent theatre, if one that might well have been
seen twenty years or so ago. Like most productions – not, I hasten to add, the
still eminently watchable Salzburg Herbert Graf production, for Furtwängler –
it fails to reckon with the work’s religion and theology. Sin goes
unconsidered. Nevertheless, Richard Jones shows a commendable willingness to
consider many of the ideas and (potential) problems, and to weld them into a
far from inconsiderable narrative – and challenge, both to us and to the work (‘itself’
and reception). What Jones’s staging and the designs of Paul Steinberg and
Nicky Gillibrand lack in apocalyptic grandeur and high stakes, they gain in
connection to the tawdry here and now (or perhaps ‘here and then’: we are a few
decades in the past). If Giovanni cannot be an aspirant Faust – the
nineteenth-century and indeed Straussian hero – perhaps he can be, if not quite
Everyman, then a familiar manipulator and exploiter. The visual æsthetic is
familiar House of Jones, although less clichéd than some of its wares, but the Personenregie is tight.
I worried to begin with about
the lack of specificity, even coherence. During the Overture, a series of women
– and one Leporello look-alike, or at least dress-alike – pass by, cannot
refuse the seedy veteran (a nice touch!) seducer, and gain their ten seconds of
fame with him behind a hotel/brothel door. For the first scene, a
sado-masochistic (lightly so: this is certainly not Calixto Bieito, or, less
successfully, for the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, Roland
Schwab) scene announces itself, the Commendatore a hypocrite, Donna Anna,
playing on ETA Hoffmann’s ghost, opening up her own deceptive narrative; how
much she is deceiving herself, her father, Don Giovanni, her fiancé, us, is
unclear, and productively so. So far, so good, but is it not a bit odd for so
much of the rest of the action to take place in the same setting? It seems too
specific, too limiting, or, on the other hand, not nearly liminal enough. (The
brilliant Munich
staging by Stephan Kimmig, perhaps the best I have seen, certainly the
equal of Bieito, is the place to go for the latter.) Such a concern, however,
was largely banished by the strength of character and narrative drive drawn out
– an old-fashioned virtue this, and as necessary a virtue as ever – by Jones.
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| Donna Anna (Caitlin Lynch), Commendatore (James Creswell), Don Ottavio (Allan Clayton) |
What saves – and I suppose that
is, irredeemably, as it were, a theological concept – the production from mere modern-ish
conventionality, is the long game that Jones plays, revealing his hand only at
the end of the Stone Guest scene, and only granting us full understanding in
the final, endlessly alienating scene itself. (If you do not want to know his
surprise, please look away now, and move on to the next paragraph.) Eschewing
atheistic heroism of the old school, and avoiding Hell, or perhaps perpetuating
it – insert Sartre quotation here, if so inclined – the old rake, at the last,
accepts his servant’s offer to take his place with the Commendatore. That has
been cunningly prepared by what at first seems an irrelevant Jones cliché:
Leporello’s creepy, verging-upon-yet-not-quite-attaining-outlandish orange wig.
The aforementioned Leporello look/dress-alike, part of the chorus, as the work
progresses, helps keep it in mind, or at least in visual memory. In lieu of a
change of clothes in the second act – yes, we lose the distinction of social
order here, which is something, but not necessarily everything – a change of
wig does the trick. And it will again, and again. Not only does Giovanni, his
grim work far from done, take Leporello’s place in the final sextet, he picks
out the Leporello-alike from the chorus as his new servant, and the events
witnessed in the Overture start up once again.
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| Donna Anna and Don Giovanni |
Musically, we were on strong
ground. Mark Wigglesworth, following an Overture that came a little too close
to Rossini – however fast, or not, Mozart should never sound inflexible – offered
a reading which, whilst rarely close to the Romantic grandeur of Furtwängler or
Barenboim, impressed on its lighter terms. Tempi were varied, and that is the
important thing, and there was always life to be heard, to be felt, in the
music. The playing of the ENO Orchestra – and the singing of the cruelly
victimised Chorus – was always excellent. If there were more light than shade,
the scales were not tipped unduly, and the production offered a goodly amount
of the latter. Wigglesworth, who really should be reinstated as Music Director
yesterday, paced the work with a mastery born not only of lengthy acquaintance,
but of intimate understanding. Kate Golla’s harpsichord continuo – no modish,
and historically ‘incorrect’, fortepiano here – proved just as alert to the
needs of the drama and, more generally, of the words (even when less than
happily and/or accurately translated).
Christopher Purves’s assumption
of the title role was, crucially, very much in line with what seemed to be
Jones’s view of work and character alike. He had seen it all, and would see it
all again. Initially, he might seem like an ordinary bloke, but when it
mattered, not least in the serenading of ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’, he was
transformed – and transformed the situation. There were a few passages when
Purves sounded a little tired, but even those could, with a little good will,
be readily assimilated into the concept. Clive Bayley’s Leporello was,
likewise, quite different from what has become the norm, but was equally convincing
on its own terms. Allan Clayton offered an object lesson in the art of the
lyric tenor, his Don Ottavio blessed with as honeyed a tone as one could wish
for. Caitlin Lynch’s Donna Anna was more variable, not always on top of her
coloratura, and less than convincing dramatically. Christine Rice’s Donna
Elvira, on the other hand, proved brilliantly unstable – in a dramatic rather
than a vocal sense. The production seemed curiously uninterested in Mary Bevan’s
Zerlina, but there was some fine singing to be heard, in tandem with Nicholas
Crawley’s truly excellent, darkly attractive Masetto, so much more than a stock
buffo character. James Creswell’s
still darker Commendatore was as finely sung as we have come to expect from
this artist.
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| Masetto (Nicholas Crawley) and Zerlina (Mary Bevan) |
I only have one real complaint. As with
the Royal Opera’s recent new Così fan
tutte, the greatest impediment to a successful evening proved to be bad
behaviour from a selfish section of the audience. Where do these people come
from, laughing hysterically at someone walking onstage, applauding all over the
place, chattering, consulting their telephones throughout? (They seemed to find
the use of a telephone onstage too hilarious for words: a double whammy, I
suppose, which needless to say necessitated use of their own.) I am not sure that
a single number went uninterrupted, in one way or another, by the man seated next
to me, who remained quite impervious to even the hardest of stares. Such
disrespect shown to the performers, to the rest of the audience, to the work
itself, is unforgivable. A performance of Don
Giovanni is a privilege for all concerned; one is, or should be, a
participant, not a sociopathic ‘customer’. Nevertheless, the evening for the
most part rose above such distractions: no mean achievement at all.
