National Concert Hall, Dublin
There are some nice touches in Vivian Coates's new Lyric Opera production of Mozart's Don Giovanni. It's a modern-dress affair, and when the Don's servant Leporello is cataloguing his master's conquests for the hapless Donna Elvira, he reads the details from a mobile phone. And the spurting flames that finally consume the profligate womaniser are spectacular enough to make one worry about the safety of the NCH's stage.
James Cleverton’s Don, however, is a bit of a problem. He’s got out as a kind of rapaciously strutting cross between Russell Brand and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and he keeps a gun stuffed down the back of his tight trousers.
That characterisation might be workable as some kind of symbolic excess. But Cleverton is inclined to engage in a kind of vocal barking that’s anything but appealing, and the uncalled for ministrations of three half-clad dancers with horribly cliched notions of dissolute behaviour do nothing to help this Don Juan seem like a real Don Juan.
When the master slips, of course, the servant can fill the breach. And in terms of characterisation and musical delivery, that’s what John Molloy’s Leporello does. Yes, the clowning does goes rather too far. But Molloy sings with a resonance that conveys a musical spine that his master only rarely achieves.
Claudia Boyle’s Donna Anna, Sinéad Campbell-Wallace’s Donna Elvira and Marcella Walsh’s Zerlina make for a young trio of the sexual predator’s victims. Boyle’s Donna Anna is vocally feisty, Campbell-Wallace’s Donna Elvira volatile before achieving an almost unexpected nobility, and Walsh’s Zerlina altogether lighter than the other two.
As Donna Anna’s stalwart support, Dean Power’s Don Ottavio, took an even lighter and much more stylish musical approach, in a performance that brought real grace to arias that many a more experienced singer has made heavy weather of.
John Owen Miley-Read’s Masetto took a leaf out of Cleverton’s book with a manner that was overemphatic. And Brian Bannatyne-Scott presented a Commendatore that was calm and chilling. The young chorus engaged in the high-jinks Coates requested of them with spirit.
Fergus Sheil conducted with energy, thought also at times with an inflexibility of beat that troubled the singers and tended to sound metronomic. His handling of the balances between stage and pit, however, were finely judged.
Final performance tonight
