DON GIOVANNI • AIX-EN-PROVENCE
★★★★★☆
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
REVIEW DON GIOVANNI: SERIAL VIOLATOR IN A NEW ORIGINAL TWIST
English director Robert Icke delivers a visually impressive, provocative staging of Don Giovanni at the festival in Aix-en-Provence, where Italian baritone André Schuen is slick as hell in the title role. The staging takes a fresh look at the intense, almost magnetic attraction that all the women feel for Don Giovanni’s cynically seductive and morally repulsive character. Original touches and high artistic quality earn five stars from Det Sku’ Du Se.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
The production is carried by designer-smart interiors and extremely well-produced video clips blown up on wavy backdrops across the entire stage – a technique that adds a dazzling 3D dynamic to the black-and-white video aesthetic.
The remarkable conductor Sir Simon Rattle brings out the best in the orchestra, which, with high volume, effective tempi and a modern, homogeneous sound, delivers a stark, powerful soundscape that softens comfortably in the seductive, lyrical passages.
The wimpy Don is powerfully backed up by South African Golda Schultz as Donna Anna and New Zealander Madison Nonoa as Zerlina. Thus, the stage is set for a first-class opera experience, as you are quickly in for a surprise.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Don Giovanni, smeared with the blood of broken women’s hearts, seems doomed from the start, as his character, in a way I cannot quite explain, has merged with Il Commendatore, whom he soon kills and then installs in a kind of hospital/hotel suite on the first floor of the backstage!
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Among the director’s many other interesting touches is the scene where up to 20 women of appropriate diversity, wearing bikinis and Miss World-style sashes, pass across the stage while the servant Leporello lists the number of Don’s conquests, which are simultaneously blown up on a giant scoreboard, as seen in ice hockey and handball arenas.
Another of the director’s tricks, which I find a little over the top, is to add a girl aged 8-12 who is let onto the stage with her teddy bear and ends up in Giovanni’s arms.
The child is supposed to represent Donna Anna’s doppelganger and a naive young girl’s dream of love. When Don caresses her in the middle of the stage, it adds an almost paedophilic angle that is distasteful – but nonetheless completes the character assassination.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Perhaps this is also why Leporello has rarely been seen stronger and more aggressive than in this production.
The festival has just received the prestigious Birgit Nilsson Prize of $1 million, which for the first time has been awarded to a company rather than to individuals such as Plácido Domingo, Nina Stemme and conductor Richardo Mutti, who are among the previous recipients. The prize was probably intended for the charismatic theatre director and conductor Pierre Audi, who was head of the festival for a number of years but who died suddenly.
The award was probably intended in large part for the charismatic theatre director and producer Pierre Audi, who had been the festival’s director for a number of years but died suddenly during a visit to China in early May.
PR
Last year, Pierre Audi completed the Brussels Ring with two successful rush productions of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung after one of my favourite directors, star director Romeo Castelucci, threw in the towel.
I spoke with the sharp but also likeable Audi at the after-parties for both premieres, and he was cool and confident enough to confide in me: ‘Castellucci can be exciting, but when it came to The Ring, he couldn’t handle the narrative!
May his memory be honoured.
