Don Giovanni
Welsh National Opera, Millennium Centre, Cardiff
 

THE reopening of theatres in Wales has been eagerly awaited and Welsh National Opera rewarded the audience with a superbly crafted production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

As is often the case with Mozart’s operas he gives the women singers the best arias and strong roles in this morality tale.

The opera itself already holds the basic building blocks of great theatre in its beautiful music, sublime arias, violent death, sex, retribution and comedic moments.

In the hands of director Caroline Chaney and her ensemble of talented singers the jigsaw is assembled to produce an outstanding production.

Don Giovanni was sung on opening night by Andrei Kymach and a fine lecherous and lying libertine he gives us.

The amoral Don has supposedly seduced thousands of women but as the action opens he has just tried to rape Marina Monzo’s Donna Anna.

After his victim raises the alarm Don Giovanni kills her father, James Platt’s Commendatore, as he tries to stop the intruder.

Meeting up with his ill-used servant Leporello afterwards, sung here by Simon Bailey, the sexual predator’s book of conquests is updated. And it is the byplay between Don Giovanni and his servant which is often laugh-out-loud funny.

The audience reaction to a licentious, lying upper-class scoundrel is interesting. Of course, the opera has been written to include comedic moments, but to a modern audience rape and violence towards women is not usually a laughing matter.

But Don Giovanni is not the first serial-seducing, lying rogue to engage audiences when we know his behaviour should repulse.

The Etonian chancer occupying Number 10 is an obvious example of this ability to charm audiences with comedy, despite knowing that his behaviour and attitudes are appalling.

At least in the opera we know that the villain gets his just punishment.
 
Seeking to escape the women and their husbands pursuing him by hiding in the cemetery containing the grave of the murdered Commendatore, Don Giovanni appals Leporello by inviting his dead victim to supper.

This sets up a spine-tingling denouement as Mozart pulls out all the musical stops to heighten the sense of impending doom as Don Giovanni faces his otherworldly nemesis.

This is a mesmeric production with fine singing and acting and deserves the largest audiences that can safely enter the theatre.

Tours England and Wales until May 13 2022. See: wno.org.uk for details.