![]() Though set in the rubble of annum 2080 it was an absolutely straight forward reading of the DaPonte libretto. ![]() The stage bathed in an apocalyptic yellow light, Don Giovanni slaughtered the Commendatore, bantered with Leporello, avoided the love-crazy Elvira as best he could, assuaged the orphaned Donna Anna as best he could, seduced Zerlina, - masterfully to say the least, manipulated Leporello ruthlessly, and grandly and heroically met his fate amidst the flames (quite real) of hell. Present most of all was libido, pure and simple - the irrepressible libido of Don Giovanni, though there seemed no general shortage. Nicole Car as Donna Elvira, Etienne Dupuis as Don Giovanni And, besides the fashionably, late twenty-first-century-attired aristocrats, a rag tag group of Mozart’s peasants, some obviously homeless, others dressed like the festive vagabonds of San Francisco’s Haight Street (a remnant of its last century Flower Child culture). ![]() What and who was left was Leporello’s shopping cart and a hand turned generator that could illuminate a small lamp (as well as project the mille tre names of Don Giovanni’s Spanish conquests onto the Monticello façade). A lot of things did come to mind, none seemed relevant. Cavanagh with a great big, sweeping, sometimes violent reading of Mozart’s overture that well supported the Armageddon action projected on the show scrim - though amidst the flames and smoke we really couldn’t know what was the good and what was the evil. But in Don Giovanni, director Cavanagh creates American history by imagining the state of Virginia in the year 2080, a sort of deconstructed Monticello (a neoclassical abstraction thereof) as a post apocalyptic ruin, its façade draped in tattered strips of stars and stripes.įrench conductor Bertrand de Billy obliged Mr. ![]() The trilogy has been staged by Canadian director Michael Cavanagh, mining American cultural histories first in the Jeffersonian world of black slaves and its pursuit of liberty, then in the genteel world of Southern comfort in the smug complacency of a repurposed Colonial mansion, now a country club. The crowning jewel of Mozart’s operas has arrived at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera now completing, finally, the Covid thwarted rollout of an integrated Mozart/DaPonte trilogy. ![]()
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