At the heart of Jonathan Kent’s Don Giovanni is a giant cube. Textured with wilful trompe-l’oeil complexity, this is the revolving home of the action, its sides splitting seductively open to reveal all manner of vices and voyeuristic scenes of pleasure.
As symbols for Mozart’s Don go it’s a good one: coaxing us in while ever sliding away; pulling up the drawbridge just as we venture forth with our sympathy, leaving us battering our fists helplessly against the wall.
So far, so Jonathan Kent. There is a visual rhetoric to the director’s productions that is distinctive if not always entirely sympathetic to its material. Allied here to the weaker Vienna version of Mozart’s score (sacrificing Don Ottavio’s “Il Mio Tesoro” and gaining a rather banal Act II duet for Zerlina and Masetto), his innovations lack the dramatic anchor they need, and it is the tragic trajectory of the Don himself that suffers. The climactic encounter with the Commendatore – here a half-buried corpse borrowed from a B movie – trades symbolism for fleshy realism, sacrificing allusion without gaining much by way of immediacy.
There’s no denying the production’s stylish visual quality, however. Relocated to the 1950s Italy of Fellini and Antonioni, the marble sturdiness of the architecture is undercut by Chirico-esque colonnades, all false perspective and exaggerated angles. The Don himself (Lucas Meacham) becomes a slick Mafioso, taking as much care over his tailoring as his seductions, while Zerlina (Marita Solberg) and Masetto (David Soar) are all flammable fabrics and candy-coloured vulgarity.
The cube itself proves a neat and ingeniously flexible device for Glyndebourne’s narrow stage. Rotating from brocaded palazzo to graveyard, the scenes revealed become progressively more deconstructed, their angles more extreme. The result is an intricate ensemble tableau for “Venti Turbini” (characters spatially out of kilter with each other and their environment) and a finale that takes place on a striking gradient.
We open with sudden violence. Lights (including the ubiquitously glowing emergency exit signs) cut out as the opening chords descend. It’s a bold gesture from Ticciati, and heralds a swift Overture, the sharply-pointed angst giving way to the frothiest of folly. This pace is sustained throughout the evening, and if it lends urgency to Kent’s occasionally rather oblique visuals it does also refuse to linger, even where the score calls for it.
While there were issues of ensemble on opening night, the quality of the singing in this revival is excellent. An underused Toby Spence brings line and an unusual masculinity to Don Ottavio, supporting the precision of Shagimuratova’s Donna Anna. Manifesting no discernable emotion, even at the heights of “Or sai chi l’onore” Shagimuratova’s value lies in her musicality and voice, which make light of the role’s vocal demands.
Showing their mettle in some of the swiftest, barely-sung recitative I’ve heard (though rivalled by Sherratt and Paterson in the recent ENO Don Giovanni) Meacham and Matthew Rose (Leporello) establish a natural partnership. Meacham has all the swagger of a serial seducer, matching it with a warmth of tone that only loses its focus in a rushed “Fin ch’han dal vino”. Rose’s height makes for an appealing visual contrast with the compact energy of Meacham, though his determined naturalism leaves much of the role’s comedy rather under-projected.
While Miah Persson’s Donna Elvira is deftly handled, it is Solberg’s Zerlina who really delights, seducing her audience along with a helpless Masetto in the pouting sweetness of “Batti, batti” and “Vedrai carino”. But even she couldn’t make anything other than an intrusion out of Kent’s S&M-themed Act II duet.
There is much that is elegant, apt and attractive about Kent’s Don Giovanni, but little that seizes or compels. Mozart’s opera is a work of violence and brutality, a mature study in the psychology (and psychopathy) of a rapist and instinctive murderer. The Don may be a monster, an accidental aggressor undone by his own charm, even – at a stretch – a man more sinned against than sinning, but he cannot be all at once. The weakness of Kent’s production is a lack of emotional and dramatic specificity – a lack cruelly highlighted by the very precision and detail of his physical staging.
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