Glyndebourne’s Don Giovanni, review — singing redeems a remarkably vague staging

Outdoors, Friday May 19 proved the most perfect day and evening of the year so far — and ideal weather for opening night of the Glyndebourne Festival season. Indoors, things were considerably less memorable. The opera was Don Giovanni, one of the three Mozart operas central to Glyndebourne repertory since this institution’s foundation in the 1930s. However, you’d never know from this production that, for many people, this has always been the greatest of all operas.

As designed by Julia Hansen, Mariame Clément’s staging is the least alluring modern-dress staging of anything (yes, anything) I can remember. If the idea is that this drama belongs to the world we know, then it’s a world where we can’t help cringing at the characters’ fashion choices. This is Don Giovanni as bad-taste party. Zerlina and her bridesmaids are dressed in bright pink as short-skirted cowgirls; Masetto and his stag-night male chums wear antlers.

Hansen has designed act one to take place inside some dim, old-style multi-storey hotel, with stairs, banisters and hall paintings. It feels wrong for every single character. In a touch of heavy-handed surrealism, while Giovanni’s servant Leporello sings his catalogue of his master’s female conquests, the paintings all turn into upper-body portraits of bare-breasted women. In act two, the decor mainly suggests a variety of exterior spaces, some of them neon-lit, backed by an array of palm trees. Bernd Purkrabek’s lighting is particularly poor, often obscure but never poetic: faces and gestures are seldom well shown.

In the most curious feature of Clément’s production, Don Giovanni does not directly kill the Commendatore. Instead the latter, attacking the former but falling down some steps, fatally injures his head on the ground. Giovanni places his head gently on the victim’s chest as he dies, but then behaves as if taking rueful responsibility. It’s possible that his guilt grows during the opera. But none of this is strikingly shown. 

Although Clément has experience at Glyndebourne and elsewhere, her handling of basic theatrical issues — exits, entrances, groupings, timing — is remarkably vague. In act two, a silent chorus keeps materialising — and then departing, as if bored — during the soliloquising arias of various characters.

Evan Rogister, a German-American maestro making his house debut, conducted a performance with plenty of zip and nervous energy if not hellfire. For those of us who love to hear Mozart sung with judicious vocal ornaments — appoggiaturas and other embellishments — here they were. Michael Mofidian was an endearing Masetto; Mikhail Timoshenko, after an uneasy first act, was vivid as a bespectacled, baffled Leporello. Venera Gimadieva (Donna Anna), Ruzan Mantashyan (Donna Elvira), Victoria Randem (Zerlina), and Jerzy Butryn (the Commendatore) all tended to employ overblown vibrato when putting any pressure on their voices; Oleksiy Palchykov applied an unconvincingly beefy approach to Don Ottavio’s arias. 

In the title role, Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky was firm-lined and suave in looks, voice and phrasing. Apart from three brief moments when he seemed to lose his cue, he was a constant source of humour, expressiveness and allure. He seems to change the size and texture of his voice to his surroundings and his role: whereas his Marcello in La bohème at Covent Garden last autumn had big-scale macho force, his Giovanni, in the smaller space of Glyndebourne, sounded disarmingly intimate, often wonderfully hushed. He plants words as if directly into your ear.

★★★☆☆

To July 15, glyndebourne.com