De Billy conducted those performances too, and their experience together surely helped make this go-round feel so seamless.Īs the central character, Dupuis invested the Don with a suave baritone that shone most brightly in lyric moments. Several were fresh from the same roles at Paris Opera earlier this year, including the husband-and-wife team of Canadian baritone Étienne Dupuis as the Don and Australian soprano Nicole Car as Donna Elvira, German soprano Adela Zaharia as Donna Anna and Austrian soprano Christina Gansch as Zerlina. It was, blessedly, like peeking into the private lives of real people. They didn’t just sing to each other, they hit telling dramatic notes.

The cast created individual characters we could relate to, and that paid dividends in scene after scene. The best antidote for this listener was to focus on the music and a brilliant cast that brought each character into sharp relief. The bleak future of this Don Giovanni, suggesting a world in which greed has broken down society and the mansion is in ruins, could not jibe with the details of a story set in specific places and social mores. Così fan tutte last fall, set in the 1930s when the mansion had been repurposed as a country club, fit that story spectacularly well. The idea worked nicely enough for Le nozze di Figaro in 2019, the not-quite-finished building mirroring a post-Colonial era that vibrated with revolutionary fervor. Let’s just say that impressively high standards of singing and blessedly detailed playing by the orchestra under guest conductor Bertrand de Billy trumped the staging.Įrhard Rom’s sets for these productions portray the same American mansion three centuries apart.

Michael Cavanaugh’s grand concept for staging the three Mozart/Da Ponte operas at San Francisco Opera got off to a promising start in 2019, peaked last fall and, unfortunately, got in its own way now with Don Giovanni. (HS) Zerlina (Christina Gansch) and Masetto (Cody Quattlebaum) © Cory Weaver United States Mozart, Don Giovanni: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of San Francisco Opera / Bertrand de Billy (conductor).

Don giovanni sf opera