Don Giovanni Glyndebourne Festival Opera ***
The new staging of Don Giovanni is Graham Vick's farewell to Glyndebourne; he stands down as director of productions at the end of this season. After the disappointments of the earlier instalments of Vick's Mozart/Da Ponte cycle - a mechanical Cosi Fan Tutte, sexless, unfunny The Marriage of Figaro - hopes for this new production might not have been too high, but there is plenty to chew on here.
There is no shortage of ideas washing around in this show, or of provocative images, but teasing out their significance, or shaping them into a coherent view of this extraordinary work proves a frustrating task. Richard Hudson's rehearsal room box set, which has served the whole trilogy, is foxed and scuffed here, and violated by a huge mound that has erupted through the side wall. Leporello is first seen with his feet embedded in this morass, and characters clamber and roll overmuddily over it.
What it means, except to signal that Don Giovanni is a far more elemental and dangerous work than the comedies of manners in Cosi and Figaro, I don't know. But then it is also difficult to work out why Giovanni, Leporello and the upper-class characters are dressed in over-the-top 18th century costumes, while Masetto, Zerlina and their wedding guests are in modern dress.
Other details - the retinue of oddballs who accompany Elvira on her first appearance, Ottavio's "masked" disguise as a woman, Giovanni inviting the Commendatore to feast on the raw entrails of a horse - are even harder to decode. Every time one gets close to finding the key to this provocative parade it seems to be whisked farther out of reach. Perhaps Vick built up the production situation by situation, trusted his theatrical instincts to find an image for each dramatic context, and let coherence go hang. Who knows?
What is certain, though, is that musically the performance is more convincing than it was in Figaro two months ago. Andrew Davis's conducting is a bit ponderous, and the recitative does not zip along as it should, but there is a sensuous and commanding Donna Anna fromBarbara Frittoli, truly world-class; a stylish Ottavio from Bruce Ford; a firm-toned Masetto from Nathan Berg. Natale de Carolis's Giovanni has a plausible physicality, though he lacks vocal variety, and his exchanges with Alessandro Corbelli's stolid Leporello don't strike sparks. An intriguing and frustrating evening altogether.
Until August 27.
