Don Giovanni disturbs and dazzles at ENO

Wanted... Mary Bevan as Zerlina and Christopher Purves as Don Giovanni
Photo: Robert Workman

WANTED. A huge poster of Christopher Purves as a gangster-like, shaven-headed Don Giovanni, states as much. He's wanted for murder...but also, for other things, by every woman who crosses his path, to say nothing of the occasional bloke. Sensuality, magnetism, confidence and the knowhow of the older man, backed up by threat, are working their illogical yet eternal magic.

In an age in which subtlety is not generally much valued, Mozart's operas seem to be getting harder to stage. They defy easy classification. Just when you think one of them will be tragic, it makes you laugh; and you decide something is a comedy of manners, only to have it kick out your guts. So what to do with Don Giovanni, that peerless "dramatic comedy" about sex, violence and hellfires, in a 21st century inured to the first two and disbelieving of the third?

Whatever you think about that, you may not have foreseen the utterly brilliant twist that the director Richard Jones brings to the denouement in his new production for English National Opera. It's tempting to spill the beans, but suffice it to say that whatever puzzles you in Act I, such as the presence of a Leporello look-alike, may come home to roost after the interval; and that the dizzy episodes of mistaken identity assume a more important position in the drama than usual. Problem: the meaning of the end is changed. But one can puzzle over that conundrum only to decide (as I did) that it's so flipping clever you just don't mind.

Clive Bayley (Leporello), Christopher Purves (Don Giovanni), Caitlin Lynch (Donna Anna)

Jones's set designer, Paul Steinberg, offers a gloomy, impersonal scene full of doors, resembling a dingy hotel sometime before mobile phones were invented; a phone box has a vital role to play. Looming yellow streetlights and a desultory party scene do little to liven it up. Act I begins with Giovanni rapidly servicing a stream of black-clad female clients (plus a man); the attack on Anna is transformed into a sex game, the sounds interrupting her father's session with a hooker in the room opposite. Derangement soon seeps in around the edges - perhaps the result of the constant hot-cold manipulation Giovanni foists on those around him. Elvira is basically nuts, as are strange shivering, gyrating dancers at the party; by the start of the final scene, Leporello too is losing it a bit.

If that feels glum and confusing, don't worry: most of what's going on is setting up what's to follow in part II - a key moment of which involves Giovanni's Serenade as a phone call, the effect of which upon Elvira's infatuated maid almost exceeds John Cleese's Russian in A Fish Called Wanda. Jones astutely counters this with Anna's 'Non mi dir' likewise delivered to Ottavio at a distance - however tangled in the wire you are, it's still a sorry way to chuck your fiancé for a year, especially when he is as wonderful a singer as Allan Clayton.

Allan Clayton as Don Ottavio. His expression was common to many of us by the end.
Photo: Robert Workman

Mark Wigglesworth is back in the pit he recently elected to leave when he resigned as ENO's music director. His Mozart certainly shows us what the management has lost with his departure. He's a rare, self-effacing conductor, modestly picking (mostly) excellent tempi, accompanying (mostly) ideally and leading a light-stepping, supple account of the score. One tricky moment when the stage and pit parted company will probably vanish with the first-night nerves. Meanwhile we wish, wish, wish he was staying.

The cast is very fine, with Clayton outstanding in the two tenor arias and the American soprano Caitlin Lynch as a characterful and precise Donna Anna. Christine Rice is quite a surprise as Donna Elvira; we more associate her with mezzo roles, yet her voice seems to be growing in both range and amplitude. And even if I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that Elvira is off her trolley - she is far too subtle and fascinating a character for that - Rice brings her a convincing sense of desperation as the love she loathes simply refuses to die. Zerlina is Mary Bevan, pure-toned and full of warmth, clad in white while all around wear black. Nicholas Crawley is a strong, bitter Masetto and James Creswell as the Commendatore delivers a magisterial cameo.

But it is the double-act of Christopher Purves and Clive Bayley as Giovanni and Leporello on which the show hinges, and they don't disappoint. Purves's soft, velvety, sensually nuanced singing brings an edge of sinister magic to the Don; Bayley, as professional sidekick, is deeper and louder, yet meshes beautifully. The relationship is splendidly worked, full of details such as a much-lived-in drinks-serving ritual; and even if their modus vivendi seems balanced and settled, the master's more than callous treatment of the servant proves that any suspected affection is in fact non existent. You can be left wondering how many Leporellos the Don gets through, each one perhaps presented with the same glasses and red wig.

Would one really be irresistibly seduced by this Don Giovanni? Personally I wouldn't buy a second-hand cat-basket from him, let alone a car. But ahhh...there's the voice, that voice... He can call my landline any time.

Don Giovanni, ENO, to 26 October. https://www.eno.org/whats-on/don-giovanni/

Seeing 'The Minotaur'

A revival at Covent Garden of Birtwistle's most recent opera, The Minotaur? Time to take the bull by the horns and see it.

I'm still reeling.

The Minotaur seems to spring from a very deep, dark place and takes us back there with it. The power it packs perhaps concerns the primal nature of the myth and the archetypal imagery that it dramatises, but there is more to it than that. Whatever it says to us, whatever it does to us - from the moment the first notes growl and surge from the pit, with the film of endless swelling sea to match - it hits us at such a profound gut level that it is flummoxing to attempt quantifying it. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, is that this is an evening of gore, ferocity and claustrophobia, yet at its core is an almost superhuman compassion and empathy.

There have been some complaints in other quarters about David Harsent's libretto, but that seems a bizarre response. It's not only sterling-quality poetry, full of images that would flare at high voltage even without the music, but it also has indubitable advantages of strong structure, absolute clarity, concentration and concision that many libretti lack, and that the genre absolutely needs. Every word carries the weight of a hundred, and that's as it should be. It is light years away from the verbose pretentiousness of The Death of Klinghoffer, the extended tracts of book that weighed down Sophie's Choice, the mundane cosy prose of Miss Fortune.


It's loud. Very loud. The percussion spills over on both sides of the stalls circle. The orchestration is remarkable - despite the volume and depth of the music, its is so well written that there is never any problem of balance between singers and instrumentalists. Birtwistle's sonic imagination was what stayed with me most strongly after seeing The Second Mrs Kong about 20 years ago and in this quality The Minotaur doesn't disappoint, however different it is. One of the most inspired touches is the use of the cimbalom, its hard-edged fury jangling the nerves and cutting into the monolithic textures.

This performance was one of those rare occasions when music, text, design and performance fuse into one: it's hard to imagine it staged any differently, or sung any better. John Tomlinson, Christine Rice and Johann Reiter are the original trio of Asterios, Ariadne and Theseus, each a masterful interpretation with a timbre that encapsulates his/her character and offsets the others. Elizabeth Meister is a terrifying coloratura Ker, the steely-winged vulture. Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, taking over a very tall order from Tony Pappano, who's off with tendonitis, did a magnificent job with it. Grand plaudits to the whole team - director Stephen Langridge, designer Alison Chitty, video company 59 Productions, movement director Philippe Giraudeau, lighting designer Paul Pyant.

I've spent much time in the past few days writing about The Rite of Spring (watch this space). Seeing The Minotaur with The Rite in my ears and mind was intriguing in itself. It seems to me that they share a certain wellspring, dragging us through something subconscious, something mesmerising concerning ritual, mortality, cruelty and that crucial compassion.

It's tempting to wonder what makes someone create an opera like this. Why would anyone attempt to write the last scene of the first half, death after sacrificial death in the bullring, the Keres descending to devour the flesh? I can just imagine asking Sir Harry about it, though, and receiving a response not unlike that of Jerome Kern when someone asked him what made him write 'Ol' Man River', which was originally in Showboat. He's supposed to have said: "I needed something to end Act 1 Scene 3."

Twelve hours after curtain-down I need serious coffee and I need it now.