Feel the force
Michael Tanner
Don Giovanni Scottish Opera It’s a great relief to see Scottish Opera back on stage again, even if their season consists of only a handful of performances of a couple of operas. I hadn’t realised how sentimental I was until I found my eyes brimming with tears at being in the dress circle of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal again, shortly before the more familiar rivulets of sweat caused by the invariable sweltering heat of that place started coursing down my face. And then the excitement of the tremendous opening chords of Don Giovanni, stark but full, with the lower strings prolonged to menacing effect.
Richard Armstrong, who has returned to conduct this new production, admits in a candid interview with Andrew Clark that he is at least somewhat torn between traditional ways of taking the work, including the prolongation — or not — of that chord and its successor, which is what he heard in the 1960s under Klemperer and Colin Davis, and on the other hand the period instrument and authentic tempo approach which makes itself felt first in the opera by a curt rendering of those chords. It makes a huge difference which you do. I can’t help feeling that Armstrong’s heart is still with the great conductors he learned the score from, rather than the authenticists.
What he gives us for most of the evening is a compromise, in which lean textures, partly dictated perhaps by tight funding, go with leisurely tempi and no attempt, for instance, at rasping timpani, which this opera can really do with. Brusqueness obtrudes where a bit of lingering would do no harm: for example, at the solemn moment at which Donna Anna and Don Ottavio enter in the Act II sextet, music from the land of Die Zauberflöte, with trumpets and drums, seemed to be wilfully prosaic. And in his attention to the details of accompaniment, in itself a good thing, Armstrong created, sometimes, a nearprissy effect, with the most elemental music Mozart ever wrote sounding dainty. The driving, obsessional nature of the score, comparable only to a few movements in the piano concertos, the penultimate symphony and the G minor Quintet, and suggestive of a force that propels most of the characters in the opera, so that they hardly have wills of their own, is something that distinguishes this opera from any other of Mozart’s, and gives it both its fascinating and its puzzling aspects. Without it, the piece can seem to be like a river which becomes a delta, the succession of arias in Act II mere opportunities for display for the tenor and the two leading ladies, while the baritone hero is given no such chance, and the work’s impending climax is irrelevantly postponed. Up to a point that happened on the opening evening, though it might easily change during the run.
Tim Albery’s production is neutral, neither impeding nor intensifying the progress of the drama. The designer Tobias Hoheisel, I suppose collaborating closely, came up with a dark space with a wall along which six chairs are lined up, and with doors which open to reveal blinding white light beyond. Whether that whiteness goes with the kid gloves which the Don disposes of with profligate rapidity throughout the opera I couldn’t decide. The clothes are opera producers’ favourite period this year, late 19th or early 20th century. The one figure who makes an unambiguously strong impression is the Commendatore, the most terrifying I have seen. Matthew Best excels always in the sepulchral, and his arrival at the feast does seem that of the Grim Reaper himself. I think it would be better if he grasped the Don’s hand, but apart from that omission the supper scene comes off powerfully, Leporello gibbering under the table as he should, and a hole opening up centre-stage, into which Elvira vindictively throws the catalogue of Giovanni’s conquests after him.
This Elvira is less Don-obsessed than man-mad. She comes on to Ottavio, of all people, and leaves at the very end with Leporello, presumably to seek a new master with him, rather than to head for a convent as she says. Henriikka Grondahl looks fine, if insufficiently harrowed, but her voice is too light and her acting inadequate to convey this most incurably agonised of Mozart’s women. The Anna of Maria Costanza Nocentini is a magnetic presence, with a fine voice which thins as it gets higher, so that her Act II aria was something of an ordeal. Hilton Marlton’s Ottavio is played as if to refute David Cairns’s claim, in his new book, that ‘the man is no ninny’. This one unquestionably is. The servant pair is attractive and their scenes go better than any others, which says something about the way the piece is treated. Leporello is scabrous, a suitable servant for his master. Peter Savidge’s Giovanni was off-colour on the opening night, but seemed intent on a rather lowkey portrayal of one of opera’s most selfadvertising creations. Stealth is Savidge’s mode, and he slithered into ‘La ci darem’, his best moment.
A general lack of high spirits, even some debility, seemed to affect the action overall. But it isn’t irremediable, I think, though this opera causes more problems at present, to judge from the productions I have seen over the past decade, than any other of Mozart’s.
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