By Donna Perlmutter
When was the last time you saw a “Don Giovanni” that let the compulsive womanizer and his accomplice luxuriate together in their deep, richly burnished baritonal voices -- and nearly overlook their complex, nefarious but wry interplay? In other words, sing more, act less?
Wasn’t it always thus? Did their seduction plottings ever take you beyond the singers’ luscious intonations? Beyond their great big, luscious intonations?
Well, get ready for a change. A marvelous one.
It’s there at the Music Center Pavilion with LA Opera’s Kasper Holten production of this crime-doesn’t-pay Mozart favorite -- because the play is the thing, especially when it comes to the characters’ abusive pranks against the gender-disadvantaged, the MeToo minority. The two characters are deeply funny, as you’ve never imagined. Real, as rarely happens on an opera stage. Devious, as the best mischief-makers can conjure.
In fact, here, Lucas Meachem (the Don) and Craig Colclough (Leporello) show us those detailed aspects of their man-centric collusion. And no small credit goes to the collaborative forces of hands-on director Greg Eldridge and supertitles writer David Anglin, who brought off these Oscar-worthy enactments, pulling us into every word, every response.
But that’s not all.
Musically -- together with the rest of the cast, all under the astute direction of James Conlon -- Mozart was treated to such niceties as the wonderfully heard obbligatos from wind players accompanying the arias. And the chamber-like quality throughout, even in this 3200-seat hall, came across splendidly.
The only quibble would be those first minor-key pronouncements in the overture that were, for this taste, a tad slow, a tad unemphatic. Still, the whole score goes spinning around in my head, days after the opening -- which earns the performance a gold medal.
But let’s not forget that, by today’s standard, 18th century operas would be tightened/edited, to reduce lagging moments and repetition. So why not leave behind the old persistence of treating their repertory like the Holy Grail, untouchable.
Thankfully, this production does incorporate past and present. Es Devlin’s superb, high-functioning set design features a modular unit: an open, two-story affair with revolving interior and stairways that focus the characters’ varying relationships at different moments.
All of it is fronted by classical panels onto which, during the overture, ”a moving finger writes” (Omar Khayyam) in fancy cursive -- one by one -- the 2065 names of women seduced by the sociopathic Don.
What a device! Terrific. Right from the start, an audience gets to understand this historic anti-hero through the evidence of his misogyny. But what the director shows us via his contemporary insight is that the three women he seduces are not just victims -- they don’t exactly run away from the Don, they’re actually attracted to him, almost waiting for and open to his advances.
Realism is front and center here. For one thing, everyone looks his or her part --attractive and youthful.
Meachem, dashing personally to begin with, makes the Don a handsome, appealing aristocrat, a kind of Heathcliff with bad instincts, and sings with a supple, dramatically adaptable voice, one that matches his various exploits as well as his defiance and allure. His penalty of death or extinction takes the form of invisibility.
To wit, he dances around and addresses his victims in the finale, but they can neither hear nor see him. At last, he is made to feel frustration, the frustration of ordinary mortals who cannot disregard others with impunity. An original idea, one that actually works.
Others backed up the scheme. Colclough as Leporello (in a “Waiting for Godot” hat) knows that words matter, deeply, and his are sung with special clarity and pointedness, along with vocal color. Guanqun Yu’s Donna Anna boasts a voice of luminous beauty that holds its body up and down the scale. So does Isabel Leonard, a Met regular, and here a bloodlust Elvira, sing with resonant bravura.
Meigui Zhang, the not-so-innocent Zerlina could still make the undervoiced Alan Williams, her swain Masetto, feel loved. Anthony Leon (with a sizable family/colleague contingent of audience admirers), is the work’s other hopeful suitor, Ottavio, and he delivers a small but pleasingly agile tenor.
On the recital scene, and away from downtown, the BroadStage in Santa Monica hosted that newly reigning dramatic soprano, Lise Davidsen. Worries about whether such a big voice in this relatively small hall would blast us to smithereens simply fell apart -- due to the brand new panels behind the singer, who, with her partner, pianist, James Baillieu, made a veritable feast of their program.
Yes, her voice is one of those in-born instruments, a machine, say. It rolls out like an ocean with an amplitude that cannot be created or manufactured, thrilling in its connectedness of phrases.
And, in a varied program that suited her talents, she reached inside to include Lieder, the more nuanced art songs, those best-known Schubert songs that depend more on interpretive shading than size and power. But her vocal training, its overwhelming sound, blotted out any word-pointing or miniaturist facets, although Baillieu made up for that lack with his ultra-sensitive preludes and postludes.
Pity, that the days of Elly Ameling, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf are gone. Those were among the recitalists who captivated audiences, who held you to their every intimate phrase, gesture, coloration, flicker of a tone, a word, an eye.
It was sung poetry.
We need to remember.