LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera
Don Giovanni

Alan Gilbert, Musical Director of the New York Philharmonic, is conducting this performance.

A Rogue by Any Other Name

‘Don Giovanni’ at the Met Opera and in Two Other Stagings

FEB. 6, 2015

Lately, the news has been filled with reports of privileged men, from star athletes to venerated comedians, using their power, in some cases their physical power, to seduce and control women. So, by comparison, the sex-fiend side of the charming Don Giovanni, the title character of Mozart’s most complex opera, can seem not so threatening.

Giovanni’s licentiousness can get lost amid opera’s conventions, especially this work’s opera buffa trappings.

That is especially the case with the British director Michael Grandage’s 2011 production for the Metropolitan Opera, which returned on Wednesday night, featuring the dynamic baritone Peter Mattei in the title role, and Alan Gilbert conducting. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who has staked his reputation on bringing contemporary theatrical thinking to the company, has delivered some fresh and compelling new productions. Mr. Grandage’s tame “Don Giovanni,” with its period costumes and static, sliding three-tiered set, is not one of them.

But two modern, some would say radical, productions slip “Don Giovanni” into grim contemporary contexts: one by the Austrian film director Michael Haneke for the Paris National Opera, which I saw last month; the other by the ingenious Russian theater director Dmitri Tcherniakov for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, which I saw last week. Though very different, these productions compel you to think about how society flounders over dealing with consequential men who menace women.

Mr. Grandage’s staging is fluid and clear. There are some striking visual effects: Giovanni is dispatched to hell amid a near-inferno of shooting flames. And the cast was impressive overall. Mr. Gilbert, who, it was just announced, will step aside as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the summer of 2017, drew a richly detailed and shapely performance from the great Met orchestra. Still, if Mr. Grandage had anything new to say about this Mozart masterpiece, it did not come through in his essentially traditional production.

Five nights earlier, I had attended the Canadian Opera Company’s “Don Giovanni,” the North American premiere run of Mr. Tcherniakov’s staging, a coproduction with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Teatro Real in Madrid and Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Mr. Tcherniakov, who also designed the set and (with Elena Zaytseva) the costumes, presents “Don Giovanni” as the contemporary story of a rich, extended family living amid the baronial splendor of the Commendatore’s house. All of the action takes place in the wood-paneled sitting room of the mansion, its walls lined with books, and vases of flowers everywhere.

In a reading of the opera that some traditionalists may find a concept-driven distortion, Mr. Tcherniakov invents familial links between some of the characters, relationships made explicit in the program. In the libretto, Donna Elvira thinks herself Giovanni’s wife, asserting that he had “declared” her as such, only to abandon her cruelly. In this staging, Elvira is definitely his wife, an embittered woman who, while still obsessed with Giovanni, sees right through him.

And Donna Anna, the Commendatore’s daughter, who fights off the lecherous Giovanni in the opening scene, is here made Elvira’s cousin. Zerlina is no mere country lass, but Donna Anna’s impressionable daughter from a previous marriage, hence the Commendatore’s granddaughter. Donna Anna’s new fiancé, Don Ottavio, seems unsure of his place in this dysfunctional family. And Leporello? He’s a young relative of the Commendatore’s, living in the house, which lends ambiguity to his relationship with Giovanni, his supposed boss.

In this production (running through Feb. 21), the muscular-voiced Canadian baritone Russell Braun plays Giovanni as middle-aged and wasted, someone trying to convince himself that by luring women into sex, he will liberate them from absurd codes of proper behavior and protocols of entitlement.

The current Paris National Opera production (through next Saturday), first presented there in 2006, also tries to make the power relationships and sexual intrigue in the opera more immediate by placing the story in the sleek headquarters of a corporate enterprise. All the action occurs on one floor of the building, with a row of offices opposite a curved wall of picture windows offering spectacular city views. Giovanni, sung by the dynamic bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, is the company’s self-made, rapacious chief executive; the Commendatore, its clueless patron. Mr. Tcherniakov, who triumphed at the Met last season with his production of Borodin’s “Prince Igor,” may go to extremes in his interpretation of “Giovanni.” Yet every element is based on what seems like an acute reading of the libretto and the music. He almost eliminates the opera’s supernatural strands. Giovanni is subject to chest pains. And he is not consumed by hellish furies, but frightened to near-death by family members, who summon him to a kind of intervention. It would appear that they have hired someone to portray the dead Commendatore and terrify Giovanni, who winds up reeling on the floor.

Mr. Tcherniakov elicits nuanced performances from a compelling cast, especially the bright-voiced soprano Jane Archibald as a restless, conflicted Donna Anna, and the veteran tenor Michael Schade as an intriguingly aloof Don Ottavio. The conductor Michael Hofstetter led a grave, ominous account of the score.

Though the Met’s production is timid, this performance was, overall, the best sung, conducted and played of the three. Mr. Mattei is a commanding Giovanni: tall, impetuous and charged with sexuality: He can bend a phrase with seductive legato.

Mr. Mattei is well matched with the Leporello of the vibrant bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. He conveys the character’s bungling awkwardness. Yet Mr. Pisaroni’s natural charm comes through, lending Leporello a touch of swagger. Elza van den Heever, following her outstanding Met debut in 2012 as Elizabeth in Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda,” is back as a vocally splendid and poignantly confused Donna Anna. Her singing is agile and focused, yet luminous and penetrating.

Making his Met debut, the Russian tenor Dmitry Korchak brings a warm and ardent though periodically insecure voice to Ottavio. It took me some time to warm up to the soprano Emma Bell as Donna Elvira. Now and then, she scooped up to high notes and sounded hard-edged. Still, she has a sizable voice and sang the demanding role fearlessly. The appealing Kate Lindsey as Zerlina, the husky-voiced Adam Plachetka (another Met debut) as Masetto, and the veteran James Morris as the Commendatore all did strong work.

For Mr. Gilbert, this Mozart run follows his impressive house debut in 2008 conducting John Adams’s “Atomic.” He conveyed the arc of Mozart’s score. Tempos were sometimes reined in, sometimes prodded. Yet an organic entity emerged: The orchestra played superbly.