Search - Mozart - Don Giovanni on DVD

Salzburg Don Giovanni off bargain basement rack (but priced

David H. Spence | Houston, TX | 01/01/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"As someone who regularly defends the merits of Regietheater, there are a few limits that perhaps are worth upholding, in the interest of defending music. However clever Martin Kusej's ideas - a few of them indeed are, but not many - he finds himself only halfway unwittingly in an unenviable position, as regards Mozart's Don Giovanni here.

Much of the M22 series is presumably Mozart for the 21st century. After watching this Don Giovanni, perhaps equally bad this way the Cosi, it does not provide any good reason for living in the still new century at all. It looks like it even suggests one without Mozart. Yes, the notes are by Mozart, and the words he set to music, but little else remains, anymore than anyone can see as food for Leporello and Don Giovanni to eat in the final scene, except for snow on the stage floor (`snowing' idea borrowed from the underrated Marthe Keller production at the Met?). Having Nikolaus Harnoncourt conduct this production, as at its premiere, instead of Daniel Harding, could have been more interesting; it could have also meant some clash with the production. The likes of Harnoncourt and Dohnanyi show up alongside Kusej's name on dvd. That, in reviewing this box for now, will have to remain a mystery.

In Harding, Kusej has found a near-perfect accompanist. For sake of Mozart's music, the forms therein, expression, note values at times, what shaping any number of phrases mean other than out of some clichéd vernacular that has nothing to do with Mozart, what ever arrives here seems to have done so half the time by a roll of the dice. The truncated sonata form of the quartet in Act One can not be heard at all, orchestra playing and pit-stage coordination is so sloppy. The manner of clipping note values to sound `period' winds up being effete, and even at times sounds cheaply feminized or vernacularized. Matters improve during Act Two, but even there there are unwelcome reminders of what has happened in Act One. Limp phrasing, rushing into "In quale eccessi", without any urgency of going anywhere specific by doing so, rushing Christine Schafer off a big appoggiatura right before `Non mi dir.", and others. The best one ever gets out of Harding and the VPO is standard routine.

The most interesting members of this cast are Thomas Hampson (Don Giovanni) and Melanie Diener (Donna Elvira). Diener, though looking glib more than half the time, seems to have about the most independence from the staging conceits and even meaningless musical conceits of this production. She wins a little more sympathy for her character than just about anyone else in this cast, and sings lyrically, reasonably well, though early on with issues concerning the break or passaggio, and a little of an unsupported top. Her peck on the cheek of Hampson at the end of "Ah fuggi",a heavily clipped one at that, thanks to Harding, is merely silly.

Thomas Hampson is as rogue a Don Giovanni as one will find, and his characterization remains quite intact from having sung it so many other times and in other setting than this. There are no surprises here. He is best when singing lyrically, of course, but tends to hector or shout a few more aggressive passages, with variable effectiveness. There is little clarity in this production as to his relationship with Leporello and even as to how he is different from most other men in the world about him or at least in this group, meant to represent all the rest. A bit unusually dry sounding Masetto of Luca Pisaroni and aging Robert Lloyd as the Commendatore, who becomes holograph or webcam of himself during the graveyard scene, make for sensible enough casting too of these two parts. An almost still (fully) lyrical Piotr Beczala (Don Ottavio) and Isabel Bayrakdarian (Zerlina), starting to get roughened up by Ottavio (why?) during "Il mio tesoro," do too, but there are problems. Beczala tends to sing a bit forced and relentlessly loud at times, according to what I had assumed was his standard, and even looks confused, uncomfortable with what is expected of him here - quite understandably so.

Bayrakdarian, a very charming Susanna on a number of the world's stages and I am sure Zerlina too, looks like something that has wandered in from a mean Puerto Rican barrio in Manhattan. Instead of it being evident that she is being manhandled by Don Giovanni, she is being carried around on the shoulders of Prosperpina's sisters (new characters in Don Giovanni, all wearing maiden-form bras and undies only, and with no music to sing) toward end of Act One. She leads the Don on in sluttish manner on during "La ci darem" a little more than usually is the case. Though the singing is charming, especially with "Vedrai carino", during which she looks equally beat up and bruised as the Masetto, the charm is all gone (though that is the intent).

Ildebrando d'Arcangelo is the highly wimpy, pouty, boring, vocally very mediocre Leporello. He tends to resort to barking instead of singing some of his lines, heavily clips a very important entrance during the finale to Act One, toward really changing the music entirely for a moment - not that any of that matters here - and offers tremulous (even guttural) singing at times, seldom ever close to very true to center of pitch. For those readers pejorative of Thomas Hampson,

Christine Schafer (Donna Anna) is the ideal female Thomas Hampson, with a very tubular type of and awkwardly at best negotiated vocal production (such as found from Hampson at the Met recently as Athanael), is visually unsightly in hand-me-downs, and after tentatively achieved opening scenes, becomes vocally increasingly insecure as the evening progresses. She is loudly cheered and bravoed anyway, more than Diener, at curtain call. Her leadership of ensemble in both sextets in Act Two, including Epilogue, is audibly a trial, and her slide over an entire scale of pitches during the Masks Trio in Act One is inexplicably vulgar. If there is any reason I really regret watching this dvd, Schafer, a spectacular Lulu at the Met not long before, is it. One would not sensibly cast Cathy Berberian or Teresa Stratas as Donna Anna either, but Stratas would have still sung it better than this.

Cast of six remaining singers cheerlessly group around for Epilogue, as in a world still dominated by men, including the Leporello (who has just stabbed his master to death, (out of motive of euthanasia?), who of course are all predators. Witness Proserpina's sisters all clutching themselves in pain the moment Masetto gives Zerlina a really hard slap right before "Batti, batti." Does not Kusej, in putting out Don Giovanni as a treatise on sexism, have more imaginative solutions than found here? If not, he is not qualified to stage this opera. He indeed probably has more imagination, but in the context of a festival for wealthy patrons to show off their taste for innovation or radical chic to each other (Salzburg as another brothel of the arts, like Aspen on this side of the pond), it is too easy to get lazy. Nothing here, including the set design, other than perhaps getting the cyclodome to rotate correctly, seems to require a whole lot of effort. Kusej'z treatise, if one exists, on evidence of this relies on cheap, pop psychology clichés.

With still face of Lloyd on rear screen, twenty babes bulging out of bras and undies from back and looking prematurely aging the other way, standing still, glaring during "O statua gentilissima" is the most risible moment of all, but so off-putting, the purpose of this important scene is lost. There is nothing to cheer about here. Hold on to your money."