Don Giovanni at Venice's La Fenice

I am in Milan, representing NY Law School at the International Association of Law Schools annual meeting, being held at the University of Milan.  Yesterday I took a brief trip to visit my friend Matt in Venice and he surprised me with tickets to see Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at La Fenice.  What an opportunity!  I had never before been inside a real Italian opera house – having never previously visited Italy, much less Venice.

This was a curious production.  The staging was by Damiano Michieletto, and I have to say that it started out well but got stranger and stranger.  La Fenice in its current incarnation has a turntable on the stage, and Michieletto seemed determine to use it more and more as the evening went on, to the point of having some of the singers traipsing along and get on and off the moving turntable to the degree that struck me as potentially unsafe.  There was a unit set constructed on the turntable, which revolved to reveal various interiors and exteriors of a palatial house in which all the action took place.  The second act featured a degree of debauchery and even female nudity I would not have expected to see in a Mozart production, but the strangest effect of all was the return of Don Giovanni at the end to literally get the “last laugh,” quite a subversion of the original plot.

Putting the oddities of the production aside, I thought the musical performance was splendid.  A strike at the opera house had cancelled Tuesday night’s opening performance of this production, so I was attending the opening on Wednesday night, but with the second cast.  I found them an impressive bunch, especially the Don Giovanni of Simone Alberghini and the Ottavio of Leonardi Cortellazzi.  But they were all really good, both for the singing and the acting.

I was especially impressed by the conductor, Antonello Manacorda, of whom I had never previously heard.  He led a very energetic account of the overture, then kept things moving at a smart pace without ever feeling rushed.  There were some slight faults of unity between chorus and orchestra in the first act, partly due, I fear, to the set obstructing the sight lines of some singers.  The orchestra is less than totally major league, the strings sounding a mite scrawny when exposed.  But overall the musical performance was excellent.

And I really enjoyed being in this opera house.  La Fenice has had several fires in its history, so the current house is a restoration of the original, but I don’t think they changed anything significant in the architecture when it was rebuilt most recently.  The sound is fine.  The sight lines are poor from the side boxes, but that comes with the territory.  We were in a 5^th tier box for the first act; then Matt’s friend who was able to get us the last minute tickets was able to arrange for us to sit in a 2^nd tier box for the second act, directly over the orchestra pit with a nice close view of the stage.  It was certainly an exciting experience.