Director: Vincent Boussard
With: Johannes Weisser, Marcos Fink, Alexandrina Pendatchanska, werner Güra, Malin Bystrom/Freiburg Baroque Orchestra/Innsbruck Festival Chorus/ René Jacobs
Studio: SWR Arte/Harmonia mundi
Video: 16:9 widescreen color, 1080p HD
Audio: German, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, DTS 2.0
Subtitles: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish
Extras: “Looking for Don Giovanni” – Making of documentary; 28-page booklet
Length: 2 hours 52 minutes
Rating: *****
This is the HD video of the entire production of Don Giovanni, recorded live onstage on October 6th, 2006 at the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus as part of the Innsbruck Festival. It is basically the same as the recently reviewed SACD audio set directed by René Jacobs. Jacobs strove to reinterpret this work at the center of the opera repertory, clearing away a couple centuries of “varnish,” to emerge with a more fresh and immediate musical drama.
The staging is very basic, with almost no props and multiple use made of the few architectural items onstage. The front curtain becomes an important player in the drama, with singers performing in front of it, looking thru it, and so on. The costumes are colorful and the lighting is sometimes very low-key, with the singers in shadow. One of the visual things that stood out for me was the youth of 27-year-old Johannes Weisser playing Don Giovanni. I’m used to much older and more mature Don Giovannis, but Jacobs felt the libretto shows the Don as a more immature person who would be careless about some of his actions in a way a more experienced Don would avoid. Although I felt Weisser’s acting missed some of the dramatic possibilties – especially in the final dragged-off-to-hell scene – he does have a fine baritone voice. (The lack of any gimmicks in this production made that final scene much less dramatic than it could have been; basically Leporello just pulled the red curtain across so you couldn’t see the Don being pulled down into the depths, only hearing it.)
For me the big star here is Marcos Fink’s wonderful portrayal of the put-upon Leporello. He makes the viewer feel for him in his frustrations trying to deal with his wayward master. His treatment of the famous Catalog Aria is a pleasure. Alessandro Guerzoni also makes a very imposing Commendatore, though with no attempt to portray him as a stone statue.
The transfer to Blu-ray looks spiffy, with plenty of detail in the darker areas of the stage during many scenes. The 48K/24-bit lossless surround provides an excellent audio track. This is a first rate video presentation of one of the world’s greatest operas and should auger well for many other operas to soon be released on Blu-ray with surround sound.
– John Sunier
