Don Giovanni offers promise
Don Giovanni, Wellington Opera with Wellington Opera Chorus and Orchestra Wellington; director Sara Brodie, conductor Matthew Ross Opera House, until Saturday.
There was a real sense of occasion at the opening of the newly formed Wellington Opera company. Auckland-based NZ Opera seems strangely reluctant to produce full-scale operas, so there was an opportunity for a local venture to fill the gap and fulfil perceived wants.
Opera is a notoriously complex and expensive medium, so to form a new company virtually from scratch is a tremendous achievement and a credit to the enterprise and drive of all involved, not least in securing significant funding.
Covid has been a worldwide scourge to the performing arts but this has worked to advantage in relatively safe New Zealand, allowing this new company to enlist the services of New Zealand singers previously plying their trade successfully in Europe or the United States and a finer cast could hardly be desired.
Don Giovanni is not an easy opera to bring off, especially in the need to reconcile the comic, the serious and the intensely dramatic, which is Mozart’s genius.
Sara Brodie’s rather quirky production succeeded more in the knock-about comic moments than in the genuinely frightening, especially at the terrifying appearance of the Stone Guest where Paul Whelan’s monumental Commendatore was upstaged by a gigantic puppet that flopped down onto the Don, a rather Pythonesque version of the miscreant’s descent into the flames of hell.
Elsewhere, Meg Rollandi’s minimalist set was cunningly used, though a mysterious coat rack was a puzzle in its occasional appearances, while Don Giovanni’s famous serenade, delivered not to but from an upstairs window, was an amusing change. The opening curtain’s premature rise then abrupt fall was a cunning device to give time for whatever happens – or doesn’t happen – in Donna Anna’s bedroom. But shouldn’t the Don have been given a dining table in the last scene?
Wellington’s Opera House is a small, intimate theatre but it has a cavernous backstage and sound from the stage can be reduced for want of hard surfaces. Not that anything was inaudible but it meant that some of the singing seemed at once remove, admirable rather than excitingly compelling, and the need to push the sound meant there was occasionally some wayward intonation.
Similarly, Orchestra Wellington in the pit offered playing that was more dutiful than dynamic. But it is a pleasure to report that on a second viewing of the opera these flaws were much less apparent, the ensemble tighter, the tempi more apt.
The title role is an enigmatic one: is Don Giovanni a likeable if heedless libertine or a vicious predator?
Mozart and da Ponte may have thought the former: in today’s climate the latter seems more likely, but in any case he needs considerable magnetism for his reputation as the great seducer to be plausible. (Incidentally, the underlying joke in this opera is that the Don is a womaniser by repute only: he has no success whatsoever.)
Christian Thurston sang and acted as attractively as ever but seemed too decent a man to be a totally convincing demon lover.
His servant, Leporello, was given plenty of energy by James Ioelu, relishing the delivery of his famous catalogue aria in front of an enormous banner, the Don’s Little Black Book of conquests, though what was conceived as a comic set-piece in the taunting of the hapless Donna Elvira, played and sung with great verve by a splendidly apparelled Amanda Atlas, now just comes across as cruel.
In the last NZ Opera production of Don Giovanni, Amelia Berry was a wonderful Zerlina. Donna Anna was more of a stretch for her but she was always stylish and on Tuesday the sharpness that had marred some of her singing on opening night had gone.
As her rather ineffectual lover Don Ottavio, tenor Oliver Sewell gave some of the finest singing of the evening in his two difficult arias, vocally secure and unfailingly lyrical.
Perhaps the most successful dramatic and vocal interplay was between a vivacious Natasha Wilson as Zerlina and the hapless Masetto of Joel Amosa.
So, a success? Undoubtedly a wonderful achievement, and if this Don Giovanni sometimes seemed a little less than the sum of its parts it proved its point that opera of the highest standard can be mounted here and that there is an enthusiastic audience for it.
The second performance was a considerable advance on opening night in general pacing, though some lack of musical impetus and variety was still in evidence, resulting in an opera more respectable than riveting. But this is to quibble.
Thanks to the initiative of conductor (and mandolin player) Matthew Ross and his board, this production from nowhere shows what can be done and gives promise of more good things to come.
Editor’s note: We ran a piece about Wellington Opera’s Don Giovanni in print and online on Monday but as it did not address the music or performance, we are publishing this review.