_{Royal Opera House}<em> Don Giovanni</em>“Superb revival with unintended consequences”

For Kasper Holten’s 2014 production, this is a superb revival with unintended consequences.

The production has travelled energetically since its premiere, including a run at the COC in 2024 – Gordon Bintner sang the lead then too, and it’s a role for which he’s brilliantly well-suited. The cast was marvellous. Bintner ranged from whispery, seductive tenderness to shameless, brassy braggaccio, and soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen (Donna Anna) astonished among the women with her poignancy and masterful control – like listening to an angelic knife. It’s worth noting that she will sing the title role in Ariadne auf Naxos at the COC in 2027.

Soprano Giulia Semenzato gave a crystalline, flame-flickering passion to Zerlina and tenor Bogdan Volkov did about all it’s possible to do with the cardboard character of Ottavio, who mostly sings slowly about things one has a hard time believing he actually feels. His subtly shaped “Dalla sua pace” and “Il mio tesoro” made the audience gasp. Bass-baritone Dingle Yandell was a delicious Masetto in his Royal Opera debut and surely deserves more time on this stage.

Elvira was sung by mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, never less than formidable but lacking the precision of her colleagues at this performance. Since the men spend all evening disparaging and dismissing her, even a hint of vocal messiness risks supporting their gaslighting efforts – when really, she’s the Don’s personal Fury. Roberto Tagliavini was a proud Leporello, less a whipped “dog-faced peasant”, as Don Giovanni calls him, than a horny accomplice lower down the Manosphere ladder. His exquisite phrasing and timing exemplified what meticulous support can do.

Conductor Stefano Montanari and the Royal Ballet and Opera Orchestra sounded inspired: silky – especially in the strings – luscious colours throughout and total confidence. It’s a dangerous metaphor to call a group of artists “a machine” but the language offers few alternatives to convey the sense of uncanny togetherness – an anthill?

Es Devlin’s set and Luke Halls’s videos are beginning to feel dated, but they have the virtue of being easy to ignore. Treated mostly like wallpaper, the slowly moving projections are the visual equivalent of elevator music. They occasionally snap into moments of meaning, in a costume change that’s projected on Leporello or a door that seems to vanish, and they become cheesy once, when the posse after the Don have to pretend to walk in place. The set rotates (quietly) and is full of secret passages, staircase and doors through which the Don and Leporello continually escape and emerge like the enormous rats that they are.

If there’s anything unfortunate, anything that can be painful about an outstanding performance, it is that it gets out of your way too much. You’re left facing the naked work. Then, even if it something as familiar as Don Giovanni, it is possible to see it so starkly that, perversely, it becomes unrecognizable, somehow distant and more real at the same time. A rediscovery of delights – or horrors.

This feeling clicked in the second act, after Don Giovanni casually mentions that he might have slept with one of Leporello’s girlfriends and Leporello replies, “E mi dite la cosa con tanta indifferenza?” In its casualness, its prettiness, this dramma giocoso plays with real horrors covered in sugar. From confronting Donna Elvira with the Catalogue – sung with delight, set to beautiful music – to Zerlina’s appalling "Beat me, beat me, dear Masetto" and countless lines insulting women, it’s a thoroughly disgusting work. Of course, we’ve known this for a while, but it seemed that the more beautiful the performance, the less tolerable the pleasure.

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