Two things mesmerized at the Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater the other night. This first-ever production of Don Giovanni at the venerable Mostly Mozart festival featured some of the loveliest, soaring, velvety voices imaginable, and strikingly innovative staging with the chorus members spray painted silver, and assuming poses as props and extras against a plain black background. It was hard to take your eyes away as they stood or sat or balanced in some impossible position, stock still, forming a bench, a picture frame or, during a party scene, imitated the sex act. Their indifferentiated bodies and faces drive the point home that this is a story very much about the pleasures and wages of the flesh.
Photo by Budapest, Palace of Arts/Zsuzsanna Peto.
Don Giovanni is Mozart’s strange hybrid, light and comical, but also tragic as the seductive, libertine protagonist progresses toward his inevitable doom. His final entry into the Gates of Hell, as one concert-goer remarked, brought to mind Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” but with living statues clawing at and engulfing him.
Opera lovers will not be disappointed as Ivan Fischer, the charismatic and talented music director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, both conducts and directs. American soprano Laura Aikin slays in the role of Donna Anna, and Hungarian Zoltan Megyesi as her beloved Don Ottavio is a standout. Not a sour note to be heard.
