Don Giovanni at the Met

Mozart: Don Giovanni

Simon Keenlyside, Don Giovanni
Hibla Gerzmava, Donna Anna
Malin Bystrom, Donna Elvira
Serena Malfi, Zerlina
Paul Appleby, Don Ottavio
Adam Plachetka, Leporello
Matthew Rose, Masetto
Kwangchul Youn, The Commmendatore

The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra & Chorus
Fabio Luisi, conductor

The Metropolitan Opera, New York live HD broadcast to Curzon Cinemas, 22 October 2016
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Having been impressed by several ballet live cinema broadcasts, this was a first try-out of opera in the cinema.  The New York Met Opera, live to Wimbledon.  Results were mixed.  Naturalistic it was not. 

Simon Keenlyside and Serena Malfi

Any cinema broadcast has to make a choice whether it is trying to reproduce the experience of being in a seat at the opera house, or created something more cinematic.  The Met seems to favour the cinematic.  First up was the sound: either all the lead singers were surreptitiously miked for the broadcast sound, or there was some heavy microphone spotlighting going on.  At any rate all the voices sang at mezzo forte and louder the whole evening, the orchestra sounded as if they sat alongside them onstage rather than in the pit, and the poor chorus was lost badly in the background.  Most disturbingly, a very un-Met auditorium reverb seemed to be added to the voices (presumably to compensate for the close miking ).  For shame.    

Add to this the cameras.  One of the pleasures of the theatre is how the set is managed to create artifice.  Does one really need cameras rising up mid-shot and gliding sideways across a character as they sing?  Maybe there was a wish to enliven what was a surprisingly drab set.  It was meant to be Seville, but a particularly dingy red-light district Seville where the various aristocrats looked distinctly out of place.

Simon Keenlyside was our Don, and eschewed any dashing allure for a more world weary attitude.  His dalliances were no longer of great thrill to him, but on no account was he going to give up his libertine lifestyle.  Maybe because of this, the emotional high point of the evening came with the cries of Viva la liberta at the end of Act 1.

Don Giovanni descends

Of the other singers, the Donna Anna and Don Ottavio of Hibla Gerzmava and Paul Appleby stood out.  Dramatically they made a formidable pair, and Don Ottavio was not the anaemic character he can often be.  Both Masetto and Leporello were huge, dwarfing the more diminutive Keenlyside.

So a mixed evening production-wise.  But nothing can take away from this masterpiece its almost overwhelming magnificence.  One marveled at its musical and dramatic depth.  And almost agreed with Kierkegaard, who thought the character of Don Giovanni in the opera to be music personified, and that only music could express the life within him.  Of the opera itself; it was simply the greatest thing ever written, by anyone, in any genre, anywhere. 

B list Philharmonia

Richard Wagner: Overture, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Sergey Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No.2 
Gustav Holst: The Planets

Philharmonia Orchestra
Damian Iorio conductor
Ronan O'Hora piano
City of London Choir

14 October 2016, Royal Festival Hall, London
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The story goes that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra reached its nadir a decade or so back when it was performing on the same night in London and Manchester.   The Philharmonia is hardly in crisis, but lends its name and a B list to evenings such as this.

While it's off the books of its official season, nothing was disastrous, or memorable, from this Philharmonia Orchestra.  A general adequacy prevailed.  Its counterpart was an audience of insistent applauders, destroying every atmospheric coda, and presumably as welcome as an internet troll for the conductor.

In many ways the Wagner was the most cogent performance of the evening.  The Rachmaninov featured a fluid soloist in Ronan O'Hora, and an unwelcome star performance from an alarmingly loud clarinet in the Adagio.  The clarinet threatened to overwhelm our unpreposessing pianist - surely a Rachmaninov first.  But it could not spoil a movement in which O'Hora bewitched an audience otherwise prone to distraction.   


Holst's The Planets could not help but engage, with Saturn particularly finely done.  But orchestral balance was a constant problem for conductor Damian Iorio.  The conclusion of Mars was white noise plus timpani.  Jupiter was jolly, and unwieldy.

Bizarrely, tickets for this were more expensive than the real Philharmonia concerts.  So if no musical memories will linger, I can feel a charitable donation has been made to the orchestra's balance sheet for the year.