Rodney Manes on the Garden's Dionysian Don

On becoming music director at Covent Garden Colin Davis said he intended "to do a masterpiece once a year and try and make some positive contemporary

statement about it. We shall undoubtedly fail ..." Unless you count Nabucco as the masterpiece (I don't), then Don Giovanni is the first one at which he has had a bash, and he has found an unexpected ally in John Copley, a producer hitherto appreciated more for his sensitive characterisation and intricate, if conventional, production detail than for his boldness of overall conception. If the Davis/Copley/Lazaridis Giovanni is a failure, then we need many more of them. Perfection, if it exists, is dull, while, as Goethe's angels affirm, he who strives can be saved.

Mr Davis also sought an audience with an average age about fifteen years younger than that which he inherited, so it is ironic that much of the booing that greeted Giovanni, mainly reserved (and planned) for him but overflowing on Copley and Lazaridis for daring to attempt a semi-abstract production of a work that is anyway as abstract as the Book of Revelation, should have apparently come from the younger people

present. Ironic but not significant:

oldies do not boo, they write whining letters to the Times sug

gesting that "when the text refers to a street or a doorway ... there is something to be said for being able to see it." The pathetic han

kering after pseudo-realism that this indicates had, I thought, been

exploded operatically when Wie land Wagner refused to accept the image of a swan towing Lohen grin across the Bay of Biscay, up the English Channel and into the Scheldt estuary.

Is this Giovanni a failure? Only in the sense that rehearsal time

seems to have run out for parts of Act 2, where some numbers are

arranged rather than produced, that not all the ideas are woven into a cohesive whole, and that in one instance there is singing that shouldn't happen to a dog, let alone a Don. Otherwise it is suc

cessful in its own terms, and more so as a blueprint; few productions demand to be developed, tightened and clarified as this does, as ' the Coliseum Ring operas have been and the Peter Hall Tristan could have been,

I'm not sure that what I got out of the performance is the same

as Mr Copley sought to put into it. The Don, he seemed to be say

ing, represents the Dionysiac, the daemonic element in us that fas cinates and repels us (as the Don does all the characters in the opera) and that we seek to sup press. The opera opens with Leoporello on stage, seated in front of mirrors.that reflect us, the audience. The ' action unfolds uninterrupted by scene changes (though not without many beauti fully contrived changes of mood and colour) and the Lazaridis decor points these moods without

in any way distracting from the action. The Don prepares for his party dressed as a maypole (back to phallic symbolism) and sings his hedonistic champagne aria multi-reflected in hinged mirrors (us, again). His descent to hell is managed with a huge white silk cloth, hinged upstage, lowered over the acting area as he and the instrument of his destruction descend on lifts — a powerful image of sweeping something nasty under the carpet, or of papering over unsightly cracks. The cast steps gingerly over it to deliver the smug epilogue that solves nothing, the mirrors re-appear, and Leporello returns to his opening position to await a fresh, or the self-same, daemon to promote. Have we/they purged this particular Dionysus? Should we even attempt to? Da Ponte was as unlikely to recommend it as was Euripides.

Much of the power of the performance emanates from Peter Glossop's Don. Mr Glossop has

been consistently Underrestimated as .a performer, mainly because he has -so often had to perform in a producer-free situation and has. had to make the best of it. Here, in the finished first act at least, he moves and acts in a stylish manner quite different from that to which we have become accustomed. The man he presents is not attractive — the Don, almost, as psychopath. A vicious below-the-belt attack on Masetto, two violent assaults on Leporello, a frightening amount of rolling white-of-eye as he seduces Zerlina.

Main opposition comes from the Ottavid of Stuart Burrows, which is brilliantly sung. Of fanatically Puritan appearance, he is made a positive character (underlined by Davis's gutsy conducting of his music). He invades the Don's party with a sinister army of sword-wielding bravos. The Don's entourage counter with pistols. Hurrah for technological advance. Wendy Fine's Elvira is carefully thought out. Her reactions to the Catalogue Aria are mesmerising — far more so that the aria itself as sung by Geraint Evans, whose standard Leporello performance is very lovable but in the context of this production totally irrelevant.

Among details still to be resolved: just how naive is Zerlina?

, Is she a conscious agent provocateur, present at the party merely to shop the Don to the masked trio? Such matters may be brought into focus at the first revival. I trust the management will not be panicked into watering down this strong production by the blind incomprehension of a noisy minority.