Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Lyric Opera, 2014-2015

Has it really been 10 years since we last heard Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Lyric Opera? The opera has a very special significance for Lyric. It was the very first opera that Lyric staged; it was the opera that put Lyric on the opera map; it was the first opera programmed for Lyric’s fiftieth anniversay. It’s interesting looking at the great casts and productions that Lyric has put on over the years. They’re a veritable pantheon of the opera greats of the mid to late 20th century: Rossi-Lemeni (Lyric’s first Don Giovanni), Tito Gobbi, Alfredo Kraus, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, Richard Stillwell, Bryn Terfel, Sam Ramey, Carol Vaness.

Last night we attended the first production in our 2014-2015 Lyric Opera subscription, Don Giovanni. The principle cast consisted of Mariusz Kwiecien (Don Giovanni), Kyle Ketelsen (Leporello), Marina Rebeka (Donna Anna), Ana Maria Martinez (Donna Elvira), and Andriana Churchman (Zerlina). I would characterize it as a young cast, with ages ranging from late twenties to early forties. I thought they gave workmanlike performances. I found no thrilling moments but there weren’t many clunkers, either.

The 20th century costumes and sets were engaging and interesting. The staging was pretty par for Lyric.

There was an enormous amount of coke-sniffing and groping—the production took great pains to paint the Don as a thorough-going scenery-chewing villain. I think the reality is that Don Giovanni is simply not in accord with modern tastes and a modern audience finds the underpinning drama (and comedy!) very difficult to comprehend.

The question I would ask of the cast and the director (Robert Falls) is, why did George Bernard Shaw proclaim Don Giovanni the greatest of all operas and the Don one of the greatest creations of Western art? Was that apparent in this production?

The Critics

John Von Rhein was pleased with the production:

Lyric has taken justifiable pride in the casts and conductors with whom it has stocked Mozart’s multilayered masterpiece over the years, starting with the “calling card” production that launched the fledgling company in 1954. The diamond-anniversary roster, headed by Mariusz Kwiecien’s volatile, charismatic Don, is in keeping with that tradition – even if the new production is anything but traditional.

Falls and his team of designers – Walt Spangler (sets), Ana Kuzmanic (costumes) and Duane Schuler (lighting) – transplant the action to provincial Spain in the 1920s, a pre-Spanish Civil War milieu where glaring class distinctions and the power of the Roman Catholic Church still prevail, even as traditional mores are rapidly crumbling.

The dramatic conceit is entirely plausible. Falls ratchets up the inherent sex and violence just enough for a modern audience – gorged on the far more explicit movie and cable-TV variety – to recognize, without playing hob with the music or with Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto. Apart from a few gratuitous directorial touches, the show succeeds brilliantly: This “Don Giovanni” is as nourishing to the eye as it is to the ear and mind.

Carnality hangs heavily in the thick Iberian air. Into this steamy backwater swaggers Don Giovanni, a heedless sexual predator whose courtly manners barely mask his insatiable sexual appetite. Seldom do we see this libertine without various women pawing him, or him pawing them in return (distracting and unnecessary in the Don’s Champagne aria).

So was the Sun-Times’s Wynne Delacoma:

Saturday’s performance of “Don Giovanni,” conducted with a lithe but probing touch by Lyric’s Music Director Sir Andrew Davis, attested to Lyric’s lifelong ambitions and achievements. Falls is a distinguished, Tony Award-winning director, and at its best his staging, which updates the action to pre-Franco Spain of the 1920s, reflects the conflicted emotions of Mozart’s characters. Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien is one of the world’s best Don Giovannis, a trim, handsome bundle of raging testosterone. Puerto Rican-born soprano Ana Maria Martinez was fully his vocal and dramatic equal as Donna Elvira, a seemingly liberated, motorcycle-riding lady who can’t decide whether she loves or loathes the fickle Don.

et designer Walt Spangler has placed the action in an austerely elegant courtyard dominated by a grey stone façade and tall, ornate Beaux Arts doorway. The peasants cavorted in a lush garden whose path, hidden among rows of sloping, undulating hedges, climbed to the sky.

With touches like newsboy caps and suspenders for the male servants, costume designer Ana Kuzmanic captured the feel of working-class, 1930s Spain. But in the ball scene, her lavishly stylized, brocade and velvet costumes for Donna Elvira, Donna Anna (Marina Rebeka) and Don Ottavio (Antonio Poli) clearly delineated the chasm between the aristocrats and the common folk, an important point for Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Dancing solemnly, the three moved like alien beings among the baffled peasants.

Motivations are often murky in “Don Giovanni,” however, and Falls and his cast haven’t fully worked out the tangles. In Act I Martinez’s Donna Elvira was more a raging harridan than a woman sincerely torn between love and hate. Rebeka brought a ringing, agile soprano to Donna Anna, but we wondered whether her initial encounter with the Don was consensual or forced. As Don Giovanni’s put-upon servant, Kyle Ketelsen’s Leporello lacked emotional shading.

Don Loomis, writing at Financial Times:

Mariusz Kwiecień’s masterful Don Giovanni, good looking and rich voiced, is unusually hot-tempered. But he knows how to captivate, as his robustly masculine yet irresistibly phrased Serenade demonstrates. Lacking a big lyrical aria, Giovanni can sometimes seem a shadowy figure, but Kwiecień ensures he remains front and centre in the drama.

Kyle Ketelsen’s Leporello is nimble and well-sung but hard-pressed to keep up with Giovanni’s aggressive demands. Marina Rebeka’s gleaming, exquisitely focused soprano dealt squarely with Donna Anna’s dramatic high points, and Ana María Martínez’s compelling Donna Elvira, who arrives by motorcycle, was at her best in fulminating against her seducer in her Act 1 arias. Andriana Chuchman and Michael Sumuel sang agreeably as the peasants Zerlina and Masetto, but Antonio Poli’s Don Ottavio had more vocal muscle than finesse. Andrew Davis’s conducting was polished, fluent and correct.

He gives it four stars. I would have said three or three and a half.

At The Chicago Reader Deanna Isaacs saw something a bit closer to what I did:

The announcement that Robert Falls would be directing Don Giovanni , the opener for Lyric Opera’s 60th season, was reason to hope that this 18th-century staple of the repertoire would get a shakeup that would really make it click with a 21st-century audience.

That didn’t happen. Falls does give it a nudge, however. He’s pushed the Spanish setting to the 1920s. And he’s introduced so much coke snorting and erotic pawing you might think you’re at Chicago Opera Theater. But that’s the easy stuff. It would take a more revolutionary treatment to keep this farcical/gothic morality play of a libretto, by Lorenzo Da Ponte, and its repetitive musical format from the occasional dip into tedium.The kind of treatment that would have purists up in arms.

So Falls has delivered a very pretty but basically traditional version of a Mozart opera that, arguably, could end at intermission. With the exception of a couple of arresting pieces of stagecraft—the statue that comes to life, the descent into hell—what (besides, of course, the music) would be lost? Falls has said that his intention was to bring 20th-century psychology to the work, but Da Ponte’s Giovanni is so thoroughly worthless, and such a lightweight, even his rebellious refusal to repent can’t make him interesting.

She goes on to praise the singing.