| re: Disagree (spoilers) | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 08:58 pm EDT 05/29/23 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 08:43 pm EDT 05/29/23 | |
| In reply to: Disagree (spoilers) - StanS 05:38 pm EDT 05/29/23 | |
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| The Met is a huge house and though I haven't seen Don Giovanni in a more intimate house (I missed my chance to see the Berkshire Opera's production last summer) I did recently see a Mannes School of Music production of Magic Flute in a smallish auditorium and the opera felt very much at home in that scale. But to respond to some of the things above, both Don Ottavio and Masetto are packing guns in Da Ponte's libretto (pistols and a musket). So the substitution of drawn guns for swordplay isn't that far of a distance from one era to another. The villagers drawing guns instead of peasant weapons is another matter, I liked it and thought it was effective. The Giovanni/Zerlina seduction in this production began with the recitative which as others have said is one of the novelties of this production, the way the recitative and arias almost dovetail each other without pause. What I saw was a seduction scene that began with the recitative and was in full swing when La ci darem la mano began. Many reviewers have written about the absence of masks. I felt as you did in the initial scene with Donna Anna. Why wouldn't she recognize her rapist? Yet Federica Lombardi's revelation-aria of her rapist's identity didn't suffer from that bit of staging, the absence of a mask on her attacker. If anything it opened up the performance to a kind of deeper recognition of horror. Van Hove did use some traditional short-hand staging for the mistaken identity scenes (like Leporello pivoting from having his face seen full on). I didn't miss a more strenuous effort to make those masked and mistaken identity scenes work because I never have seen them work. I suppose if I had seen the opera for the first time without reading a synopsis it might have been a bit more confusing but it's always seemed contrived to me in any staging I've seen. (See David Salazar's excellent discussion of the opera's Second Act in his review attached below.) The set did move throughout the opera before the banquet scene and it was done rather elegantly in how imperceptible it was. I thought that was remarkably well done by the production team so that when the banquet scene occurred and the set spun into a kind of dead end vortex it carried an uncanny dread and emphasis. |
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| Link | David Salazar's review |
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