Review | Opera as it should be: no contemporary setting, Aids ward or bombast in this Don Giovanni production
- Opera Hong Kong’s simple, conservative production of Mozart’s ‘serious comedy’ allowed the work to speak for itself – quite a radical idea these days
- Richard Ollarsaba as the decadent don and Joseph Barron as his wing man excelled, and the women characters were more than the usual one-dimensional comic foils
The most remarkable thing about Opera Hong Kong’s production of Don Giovanni last weekend was how unremarkable it was.
No one was wearing contemporary costumes, nor did 17th-century Seville suddenly shift to modern-day Spanish Harlem. The legendary seducer found his eventual consequences neither in a bombastic multimedia descent to hell nor a downward spiral in a hospital Aids ward. All of which, by the way, have been crucial elements in other directors’ version of the opera today.
Instead, director Jean-Louis Grinda (adapting his earlier production from Opera de Monte-Carlo) kept his ideas comparably small. Eric Chevalier’s sets evoked a Spanish setting with a minimum of arches and porcelain tiles. Roberto Venturi’s lighting scheme kept the visual field tightly focused without becoming claustrophobic.
Yet strangely enough, this simple, conservative production ended up doing something rather radical: letting Mozart’s opera speak for itself, without hi-tech bells and whistles or intrusive directorial “concept”.
Citing the piece’s original label as a “serious comedy” in his programme note, Grinda set the brisk, dramatic pace of a seduction farce while never quite matching the form’s frivolous tone.
Most of Friday night’s success, though, was due to the cast of principals.
