Tuesday, June 07, 2022

Don Giovanni, San Francisco Opera, Media Round-Up

Etienne Dupuis as Don Giovanni and Luca Pisaroni as Leporello in Mozart's "Don Giovanni."

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Reviews are coming in of the SFO Don Giovanni, which opened on Saturday night. I filed on Sunday and the review will be posted at Opera News eventually.

My review is, in spirit, not far off Joshua Kosman's (link below). If you're going to do a dystopian Don Giovanni, for crying out loud, don't stop with some crumbling walls and funky costumes. I want to see evidence of serious dystopia: visibly diseased folks, peasants with pitchforks pouncing on the well-fed aristos, filth everywhere. This was dystopia day camp, not the real thing.

And have a point of view about just who Don Giovanni is. It's not a coincidence that the best production of this I've ever seen took the opera seriously and didn't play it for laughs. If you're going to laugh at this opera, where most of the jokes are about sexual assault or class, you should be laughing nervously.

I'm especially disappointed because honestly, this was about the best-sung Don Giovanni that I have seen at SFO. A good chunk of the cast was new (Etienne Dupuis, Nicole Car, Adela Zaharia, Cody Quattlebaum) and they were all good to terrific. Zaharia sounded like a dramatic soprano, with a big, dark voice, so imagine my surprise at finding Lucia and other coloratura roles in her bio. Donna Anna can accommodate a range of voice types, I guess. 

Dupuis was not quite as magnetic as in the Met Don Carlos, and I feel like he has an even better DG in him, but he was fine. I liked Nicole Car a lot; she took some time to warm up but then sounded really good. There are those who will recall Cody Quattlebaum as a scenery-chewing Merolini, and it's good to see that his career is on the move.

Note that I'm practically the only person who really likes "Per queste tue manine”!

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