![]() ![]() The frequent coordination problems might have been a fluke, but Mr. With the German conductor Cornelius Meister at the helm, though, many of the rapid-fire numbers that carry the buffo weight in this tragicomedy rattled more than they hummed. Leporello’s million-words-a-minute catalog aria, meanwhile, is a showstopper. When he originated the role of Don Giovanni in 1787, Luigi Bassi (described by contemporaries as a “most beautiful but utterly stupid” singer) complained that the protagonist never gets a real aria. Watching the two singers trade places, I wondered whether Leporello was not the more desirable role. Or so I told myself on Saturday, straining to find anything of interest in this leathery take on Mozart’s dark masterpiece. That made the serenade scene in Act II, in which master and servant swap clothes, deliciously meta. ![]() Meanwhile the Met’s current Leporello, the Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov, has starred here before as the Don. That’s how, last week at the Metropolitan Opera, the Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni came to make his role debut as Don Giovanni in the same drab 2011 production by Michael Grandage, in which he has previously sung Leporello. With the exception of the noble but impotent Don Ottavio, a tenor part, the male roles all call for low voices that are potentially interchangeable. ![]() Only someone as naïve as Zerlina could fall for that.įor the cast, though, it’s a different story. Class tensions simmer in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The philandering protagonist may make no distinction in the women he hunts, but with the men who help or hinder his efforts - his servant Leporello and the peasant Masetto, whose bride, Zerlina, seems so delectable - he wields aristocratic clout like a club. ![]()
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