In his catalogue of his works, Mozart listed Don Giovanni simply as a comic opera, but as Northern Ireland Opera’s director Oliver Mears – slated two months ago as successor to the Royal Opera’s Kasper Holten – points out in his programme note to this staging, commentators and interpreters have regularly viewed it rather differently; in recent times in particular, there’s been a tendency to play the piece almost as a serious work with comic interjections, rather than the other way around.
One of the merits of Mears’s approach here is that some balance has been restored; especially given the audience’s immediate response to the jokes in Amanda Holden’s English translation, there’s a healthy amount of laughter in the house.
Mears and conductor Nicholas Chalmers choose to play essentially the second, Vienna version of the piece, though with a few cuts: so we lose, for instance, the low-comedy scene between Zerlina and Leporello, generally regarded as feeble. Don Ottavio gets just one aria to sing – not the two allotted him when the Prague and Vienna versions are conflated, as they usually are. Given Chalmers’s pacy conducting and the lucid textures he draws from the Ulster Orchestra in the pit, Mozart’s score fairly bounces along.
Designer Annemarie Woods’s visuals place the action on a cruise liner around 1960. The first of these departures from tradition is the less successful, given that it’s harder to believe that Don Giovanni could constantly evade his vigilante pursuers in a relatively confined setting, as opposed to an entire Spanish city. Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte also specified much of the narrative as taking place at night, making mistaken identities and disguises easier to accept than they are here.
During the overture we witness an enormous statue of the (still living) Commendatore being hoisted aboard. It is too physically solid to nod its head in acceptance of Giovanni’s dinner invitation in what is usually referred to as the graveyard scene, but its final appearance crashing through the wall of the swimming pool where Giovanni is disporting himself certainly grabs the attention – though in this production it’s the actual Commendatore rather than his statue who puts an electrifying end to the seducer’s wicked ways.
Despite some dubious innovations, Mears generally directs with focus as well as wit, and his cast is strong. Though Henk Neven’s baritone is on the light side for the title role, he proves an unusually credible charmer. John Molloy’s Leporello outguns him vocally, but their interactive double-act is nicely managed. Rachel Kelly channels Donna Elvira’s anxious vulnerability through her sensitive soprano. As Donna Anna, Hye-Youn Lee’s empowered vocalism compensates for some rather vague diction, while as her geeky boyfriend Don Ottavio, Sam Furness fields a lithe and decisive tenor.
Aoife Miskelly’s clearly pregnant Zerlina is sung with impeccable definition, well matched by Christopher Cull’s volatile if easily floored Masetto, while Clive Bayley – fresh from singing Leporello in ENO’s production of the same opera – shows himself equally capable of a vocally awesome Commendatore.
