Scottish Opera: ‘Don Giovanni’
Theatre Royal Glasgow - 15/05/22
A good enough but not a great ‘Don Giovanni’
I met Sir Thomas Allen the great British baritone as he and I left the Theatre Royal on Sunday after the first night. I shook his hand and congratulated him on his fine production, first seen in 2013 and now revived today. “Tom”, I said, “it’s a great production but I couldn’t get out of my mind your wonderful performances as the Don at Covent Garden with your foot on the prompt box, just being Don Giovanni. He replied, “Thanks Hugh, you clearly have a good memory!” True it is many years since Tom Allen has sung his Don at Covent Garden. He is now 77 and in recent years, as well as singing occasional smaller opera parts, he has concentrated on being an opera director, as well as being Chancellor of Durham University. His production of ‘Don Giovanni’ for Scottish Opera was well received in 2013 and it’s a wise choice for Scottish Opera to revive. It’s always a popular work, and all opera companies are having difficulty in persuading often elderly opera goers to venture out in a post pandemic world. Interestingly yesterday, despite the surtitles recommending mask wearing, there were very few masks to be seen at the Theatre Royal.
This is a very handsome production of ‘Don Giovanni’, set in Venice of course, the home of Casanova one of the inspirations for Don Giovanni. You get the occasional boat arriving on stage and lots of handsome buildings for the actions of the singers to happen around. Musically it is also very good with the always reliable Scottish Opera orchestra responding to the great music of Mozart, aided by the occasional sound effect like the great roll of thunder introducing the overture. Stuart Stratford was as ever a reliable guide in the pit and got a warm reception from the audience at the end along with the rest of the cast. There was some booing at the curtain, but my co-editor assured me it was audience members booing the character of Don Giovanni, rather than the performances of the singers. I certainly hope so. None of the singers deserved to be booed, even if they might not have been of the topflight, but here lies my problem. Having seen ‘Don Giovanni’ many times round the world including Tommy Allen at Covent Garden I know what the best is and I’m afraid Scottish Opera’s production isn’t quite in that league. I chatted to a woman before the opera and it was her first ‘Don Giovanni’. I told her she should enjoy it, as it was one of the greatest of all operas and I’m sure she did. (But let me know if you read this review!) For me it was good but not great, a good enough but not a great ‘Don Giovanni’. Let me explain why.
‘Don Giovanni’ really hangs on the performances of the 2 central characters, the Don himself and his servant, Leporello. Roland Wood is a very good singer who was an excellent Falstaff for Scottish Opera at the Edinburgh Festival last year. (Incidentally, why aren’t Scottish Opera performing in this year’s festival which has a very thin opera programme?) Yet his Don was not quite dark enough or funny enough for me in the first act, although his duet with Zerlina "Là ci darem la mano" was very nicely done and Leah Shaw was a very sweet Zerlina. Roland improved in the second act. He had some delightful business singing between the legs of Leporello in his impersonation scene and acted well in the final scenes with a really good big fire to be grabbed down to! Zachary Altman is a very decent younger American bass who is beginning to make an international reputation for himself but again for me lacked a little weight and humour in his portrayal of Leporello. I was also underwhelmed by Keel Watson’s Commendatore, both in his acting in the first act as Donna Anna’s father, and in his vocal weight in the final scenes. Hye~Youn Lee was a little over the top in her performance of Donna Anna and Pablo Bemsch a young Argentinian tenor didn’t convince me that Don Ottavio was anything other than a wet character in his portrayal. Emyr Wyn Jones gave a rather stolid portrayal of Masetto (no wonder Zerlina went off with the Don!), but Kitty Whately was a very good Donna Elvira.
It sounds as though I’m damning with faint praise but I’m not. This is a very good production of ‘Don Giovanni’ and you should certainly go and see it in its tour of Scotland, and you will enjoy it. But it is the job a critic to praise where due but also to be critical where necessary. I hope the performances will improve as the run continues and I will certainly go again in Edinburgh to see how the opera is developing. Clearly Scottish Opera can’t afford the best singers in the world, so they try and get young singers on the way up or more mature singers in their later careers. Synchronistically, on the morning of the first night of ‘Don Giovanni’ I heard Sir Alexander Gibson on Radio 3 conduct Teresa Berganza, who died last week, in an aria from ‘Carmen’ with Scottish Opera (those were the days!). I gave the bust of Sir Alexander Gibson a pat on my way into the reception at the interval. I’m sure he would be proud that his foundation, Scottish Opera, is still going but perhaps sad that it is not quite at the top level of European opera houses. I’m off to review Copenhagen Opera next week which manages to put on twice as many operas as Scottish Opera, with a population in Denmark approximately the same size in Denmark. I recently returned from Vienna where the State Opera house remains one the top opera houses in the world, again with a population not much bigger than Scotland. I review now from Covent Garden, perhaps the best opera house in the world; at present its ‘Peter Grimes’ is certainly of the highest standard. Scottish Opera may not be able to operate at those levels yet, but we should have ambitions to improve. Maybe it will take an independent Scotland to create an opera house of international standard, but that as they say is another story!
Scottish Opera’s ‘Don Giovanni’ continues in the Theatre Royal Glasgow till 25 June, moves to Inverness for 24, 26, 28 May and is in Edinburgh from the 5~11 June and Aberdeen 16 and 18 June.
