Cutting Don Giovanni down to size

A vacuum at the heart of Mozart's dark comedy at Glyndebourne

The supper scene: Mikhail Timoshenko as Leporello, Alexey Zhilikhovsky as Don Giovanni Picture by Monika Rittershaus

Glyndebourne Festival Opera built its reputation on Mozart. In 1936, only two years after the Sussex house opened its doors and gardens to the public, it recorded the first complete Don Giovanni on disc. That account, conducted by Fritz Busch, served as a benchmark for several decades, epitomising Glyndebourne’s Mozart style. The performance has rarely been out of the catalogue since.

Then, in 1977, the festival gave Mozart’s most problematic comic opera in a classic staging by Peter Hall. This enjoyed a sequence of superbly cast revivals until 1993, when a young Simon Keenlyside sang his first Giovanni for the production’s final performances.

The succeeding three decades have seen four new stagings - by Deborah Warner (1994), Graham Vick (2000), Jonathan Kent (2010) and now Mariame Clément, whose new take opened the 2023 festival last Friday. None of Clément’s three predecessors mustered more than three festival reprises - a pity in the case of Warner’s radical feminist rethink of the opera, even more so for Kent’s dark, stylish, 1960s gangster thriller, last seen in 2016.