Mozart: Don Giovanni - Glyndebourne

After the huge success of Le Nozze Di Figaro, Mozart teamed again with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte for a retelling of the Don Juan story in operatic form. Don Giovanni tells the story of the title character, a confirmed womaniser who tricks Donna Anna into giving herself to him in the mistaken belief that he is her own fiancé. When the truth becomes apparent, the outraged Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father, pursues Don Giovanni. Cornered, Don Giovanni murders the Commendatore, and when Donna Anna and her fiancé discover her father’s body, she vows to avenge his death - meanwhile, an appalled Donna Elvira, having heard of the Don’s rumoured 1003 conquests, also vows to do something about it. But Don Giovanni, unrepentant, continues his evil campaign, seducing the newly married Zerlina. But his past is catching up with him…

Once again loaded with memorable arias and ensemble singing, and propelled by a story that must have seemed outrageous back in the 18th Century, Don Giovanni is a marvellously clever and inspired work from the remarkable Mozart. This performance, staged by the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1995, is unique in many ways - not least for its staging, which is even more minimalist than the previous year’s Figaro, though this time (appropriately) making extensive use of shadow and darkness instead of a palette of whites. The orchestra this time (The Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment, conducted by Yakov Kreizberg) is a period-instrument band. What this means, essentially, is that they use instruments very similar to those in use at the time of the opera’s premiere, with gut strings giving the music substantial extra bite and verve. While not to everyone’s tastes, period-instrument orchestras work extremely well with Mozart, and their performance is first-rate throughout. The soloists are less well known than those in the previous year’s Figaro performance, but they do a sterling job - particularly Gilles Cachemaille as Don Giovanni and Julianne Base as Zerlina.

Presented full-frame as per the original master tape, this disc offers a substantial improvement in image quality over the Figaro disc, with perfect black levels and plenty of detail both in shadow and on the brightly-lit portions of the set - a crucial thing, as any compression problems here would be more than distracting. The only issue, really, is with the cables which hold up the suspended platform that is a key element of the set, and the little bit of aliasing seen on these occasionally is trivial. This time supplied on a dual layered disc, the layer change falls between Acts 1 and 2, at around the 89 minute mark; by its very placement it is completely unobtrusive, and greatly preferable to having to get up and flip over the disc.

Audio this time is provided in Dolby Digital 5.0 (the default) and 2.0 stereo. Once again, the 5.0 channel track is preferable, even for those listening in stereo, thanks to its greater presence and “bite�. Recording quality overall is superior to the earlier Figaro disc, and while there is plenty of stage noise as usual for live opera recordings (as well as some mechanical noise from the moving parts of the set!), it’s not too intrusive once you become accustomed to it. Put simply, this is like being right in the front row of the theatre at the performance, atmosphere and all.

Subtitles are provided in five languages, including English; this time they default to being switched off. Once again the use of subtitles is intelligently judged so as not to distract too much from the performance. NVC Arts has always used subtitles in an intelligent way on their discs, and this one continues that policy.

This disc does provide a very handy extra for DVD-ROM users - the full libretto in both Microsoft Word format and in HTML. The accompanying booklet, though, only provides a synopsis. On the disc, along with the usual character notes and synopsis, is a small gallery of the buildings at Glyndebourne.

An even better prospect in both performance and technical quality terms than NVC Arts’ earlier Le Nozze Di Figaro DVD, this wonderful performance of Don Giovanni should delight Mozart fans - as long as they don’t mind more than a few liberties being taken with the staging.