Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” on the opera competition in Aix | EUROtoday

Pierre Audi was about inventive integrity. It was the yardstick when the director who died surprisingly in May this 12 months took over the opera competition in Aix six years in the past. In distinction to an opera culinary that ensures fast satisfaction and fast forgetting, Lotte de Beers have been a strange-critical “Figaro” 2021, Dmitri Tscherniakov’s dissecting “Così fan tutte” 2023 or Andrea Breth’s cautious have a look at “Madama Butterfly” 2024 of their aesthetic declare.

With this 12 months’s awarding of the Birgit Nilsson Prize for the Festival D’Aix-en-Provence, singers are additionally implicitly honored. Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, the actor of the title hero, Andrè Schuen, deserved a particular prize at this 12 months’s premiere. The lyrical baritone acts virtually constantly on the stage, he locations a stunt to the ultimate of the primary act by rolling out a excessive staircase. And he performs the bodily and psychological disassembly of Don Giovannis till the hand of the commodity takes and wrestles. There are hardly any respiratory breaks as preparation for shiny aria appearances.

The British theater director Robert Icke actually takes lots within the textual content and ignores cherished traditions of the “opera clothes”. To do that, he was booed by a part of the viewers, who had no want to go together with stunning insights. The eternally silly query of Leporello, who asks concerning the duel Don Giovanni: “Are you dead or the old one?” Was taken right here very severely. Don Giovanni crouches shocked subsequent to the physique of the stabbed commodity on earth, and it isn’t clear how a lot life remains to be in it.

In basic, Leporello refuses his conventional topic, the “play bass”, with all of the jokes that stick firmly on the function. Under no circumstances is he in a submissive service to Don Giovanni, relatively he sees his unstoppable decline unmoved. In the charmant grouse title Register Arie, he doesn’t current a “list” that paperwork Don Giovanni’s conquests in Italy, Germany, France, Turkey and Spain. But he briefly factors to his mind, the place all of the numbers are saved. The lecture by the Polish bassist Krzystof Bączyk is so eloquent, vocally simply as exact, versatile and full that it doesn’t require any illustrative aids.

Director Icke however causes aids, particularly these product of flesh and blood. A dozen feminine fashions runs over a catwalk in glitter our bodies. Their expressionless eyes have as worrying because the empty ladies’s faces within the movie sequences that glint over the canvas throughout the overture (Video Tal Yarden). They come up from the top of a delirier like in a psychological thriller.

Recently, the spectators breathed their breath: a lady of a most of 9 years performs mannequin in excessive footwear and follows their comrades on the catwalk. Leporello expresses it: “His greatest passion is the young beginner”, and that isn’t the immoral Don Giovanni, however all those that wish to smile with such seemingly innocent clarification. The lady doesn’t endure any struggling on stage, however within the creativeness the case develops into an unlimited alternative. In the second act, the toddler consequently turns into the amorous object Don Giovannis on the mandolin serenade “Deh Vieni Alla Finestra”. He sings very tender, virtually inaudible within the second half, and provides the lady a present.

Is the indicated pedophilia too explosive for an “enjoyable” Mozart night in summer season, rich Aix? The opera itself talks about violence, betrayal and revenge, that are Donna Anna and Elviras, additionally in her music, stuffed with it. Anna’s anger -aging aria “Or Sai Chi L’Unore”, sung by the grandiose soprano Golda Schultz with dramatic Aplomb, represents her as victims of violence on her father; At the entrance of the ramp, the lady seconds with a silent scream. Evil didn’t even come into the world with the unstable Don Giovanni, however, Robert Icke suggests, already with the commodity, Lebemann and document lover, whose income might be Don Giovanni.

Ickes advanced opera director adjustments conventional perspective, however doesn’t staged in opposition to music. Nevertheless, there are criticisms, essentially the most tough time weighs the acoustic underexposure of all scenes on the rostrum in the course of the stage (stage Hildegard Bechtler). The reserved Don Ottavio (Amitai Patri) was left alone by the director after a very good begin, and the charismatic Magdalena Kožená as Elvira solely satisfied because of her nice expertise. As a Masetto, Paweł Horodyski supplied a gripping illustration; Zerlina (Madison Nonoa, with too high-quality voice) cuts her wedding ceremony costume for the love scene with Don Giovanni (costumes Annemarie Woods). Conductor Simon Rattle works out fantastic timbres with the Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio and provides the “Opera Buffa”, which is the miracle “Don Giovanni” with all of the drama, the required lightness.