Corporate types have a habit of going to country-house operas for the networking opportunities, staying for the interval supper, then slinking back to London before the second half. Normally one deplores such philistinism. But Daniel Slater’s new Mozart production, opening Garsington Opera’s second season in its magical prefab pavilion on the Getty estate at Wormsley, is such a game of two halves that leaving at the interval seems admirably prescient. Quite simply, Act I is staged with insight, pace, verve and wit — while Act II is very silly.
Admittedly, there are warnings from the start. Apparently, Giovanni hasn’t killed the Commendatore, who groans from his intensive-care bed before making the most remarkable recovery in medical history (or at least since Clooney left ER). True, this allows Slater to dispense with all the supernatural stuff. But what he substitutes is barely more credible and hopelessly mundane. And though it’s ingenious to turn the normally ineffectual Don Ottavio into a Machiavellian mastermind of revenge (Jesus Leon mustering a suitable scowl), that doesn’t really add up either.
Pity. Slater starts brilliantly. When you see yuppies on mobile phones, city slickers checking computer screens or doing lines of coke, menacing hoodies, and a dominatrix Donna Anna (the excellent Natasha Jouhl) indulging in handcuffs and S&M with Giovanni, you do think “here we go again”. Such gimmicks have become clichés of Mozart production.
But in Leslie Travers’s chic penthouse set Slater somehow contrives to make such gimmicks seem fresh, fun and even profound. And in Act I, at least, his cast is mesmerising. Grant Doyle’s Giovanni is a whirlwind of sexual frenzy, often rushing ahead of the admirable conductor, Douglas Boyd, but otherwise stunning. Another Australian, Joshua Bloom, is a fine Leporello, and his terrific Catalogue Aria is enhanced by the best visual gag in opera since Jonathan Miller’s jukebox joke in Rigoletto. I won’t reveal it.
Sophie Bevan is a continually exasperated, unusually funny Donna Elvira, yet when she delivers Mi tradi (moved to Act I with some historical justification) she uncovers layers of hurt and anguish. Her sister, Mary Bevan, isn’t in that vocal class, but she plays a chavvy Zerlina to tarty perfection, and Callum Thorpe’s bewildered Masetto is the ideal foil. The evening’s most shocking moment is when he lashes out in her taunting Batti, batti. What a shame such knife-edge tensions unwind so limply in Act II, especially with Boyd keeping the orchestral playing so razor-sharp. Did they run out of rehearsal time?
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Box office: 01865 361636, to July 2. Production sponsored by Jefferies