Search - Roger Soyer, Sir Geraint Evans, Luigi Alva :: Mozart: Don Giovanni

A decent choice for a super-bargain Don Giovanni

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 04/20/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is a very inexpensive Don Giovanni done by Barenboim in the early Seventies. It's better sung than his remake on Erato, and the cast is good for that time. It represents what you could have heard at Glyndebourne on a summer evening outside London. Geraint Evans sounds a bit old as Leporello, the Commendatore is woolly, and the Donna Anna isn't always on pitch, but everything else works. Barenboim uses a relatively reduced orchestra but conducts in romantic style, often with slowish tempos. He was young a the time, but his idol Furtwangler conducted this opera quite slowly by modern standards, which must have influenced Barenboim's ideas.



One big negative is that squeezing the opera on two CDs involved some cuts, mostly in recitatives and various additions that Mozart made for the Prague premiere. This will exclude serious buyers, but I can't think of a better entry-level version. No libretto.



Here's the cast:

Roger Soyer (Don Giovanni); Antigone Sgourda (Donna Anna); Heather Harper (Donna Elvira); Geraint Evans (Leporello); Luigi Alva (Don Ottavio); Helen Donath (Zerlina); Alberto Rinaldi (Masetto); Peter Lagger (Commendatore); Scottish Op Ch; English Chamber Orch.



Here is a rundown of the cuts, as provided by Fanfare magazine:

Now, it is not unusual for recitatives in Mozart operas to be shortened, and the practice doesn't upset me greatly, but there is a difference between trimming something and cutting it off entirely; and for the most part, that is what happens here. The recitatives in Don Giovanni are not filler; they are an important part of the action, as well as part of the characters' identities, and omitting them for the purpose of squeezing this recording onto two CDs is false economy. At times, the effect is ridiculous: the graveyard scene, for example, has been reduced to "O statua gentilissima" (3:36). Arias follow hard upon each other with an annoying abruptness--both musically and in terms of the editing, which doesn't disguise the hatchet job. Inconsistently, "Dalla sua pace" and "Mi tradì" (plus its recitative) are included in an appendix at the end rather than in their appropriate places within the opera--as if textual authenticity had any relevance at all in such a heavily cut recording! Apparently the original release also included the frequently cut scene in act II in which Zerlina shaves an unwilling Leporello. This, too, is missing from this new reissue. Clearly, it is no replacement for the original LPs.

"