The stage is dominated by a disorientating set of doors and panels, populated by ghostly figures, and against which are projected the names of Giovanni’s past conquests, giving an immediate sense of the appalling scale of his activities. Zuzana Markova’s Zerlina knows a good thing if she can get it, and a good time if she can’t Nicole Chevalier’s Elvira is a lost cause, although her girlish incredulity at the Don’s conquests is hard to take as for the magnificent Adela Zaharia as Anna, her cries for help are mere play-acting, and even when confronted with her father’s murderer, she is just a finger-tip away from succumbing again to his charms. Yet here too, his victims cast off their outer garments at the mere sight of him like roses losing petals in a light breeze. I wasn’t convinced by the Nicholas Harnoncourt Giovanni when that conductor said of his own production that all the women were still in love with the libertine. This is however far from a feminist interpretation. Yet as he stands alone before the final curtain, blinking in disbelief that he is still alive, he seems drained of his powers drawn from the thousands of women he has betrayed. Cocky, vain, intimidating, brutal, ever rising on a cloud of his own worthlessness, he’s the man every husband would hate. He is a haunted figure, as well as a haunting one. It would not be quite right to say that Erwin Schrott’s Don does not suffer at all. Its first title was Il dissoluto punito, but this revival of Kasper Holten’s production, like the current one in Prague, might alternatively be called (spoiler alert) Il dissoluto beats the rap.
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