FROM AROUND THE WORLD: LONDON.(Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Paradise Moscow , Don Giovanni)(Review)

The new Don Giovanni at the Coliseum brought English National Opera one of its rowdiest first-night receptions in a long while (May 31). The work of the Spanish team of director Calixto Bieito, and designers Alfons Flores (sets) and Merce Paloma (costumes), who gave Welsh National Opera a coarse contemporary version of Cosi Fan Tutte last season, it continued along the same lines but went a lot further.

This too was modern dress, the photographs in the program identifying the setting as the bar culture of Barcelona (the show is a co-production with the Liceu). Don Giovanni (Garry Magee) and Donna Anna (Claire Rutter) began the evening coupling in the back of a car, while Leporello sat on the hood and bemoaned his lot. The Commendatore (Phillip Ens actually looked about the same age as his daughter) turned up out of nowhere to be stabbed, but that was not the death of him. In the final scene he emerged bloody but unbowed from the car's trunk, to be dispatched at last by the serial seducer (something of a gloss on the text). The latter survived until the final ensemble, when the remaining members of the cast tied him to a chair, gagged him and, one by one, stabbed him with a kitchen knife.

The opera centers on the career of a man obsessed with orgasm, but the overt sexual activities in this production were by no means confined to the protagonist. Don Ottavio (Paul Nilon) partially undressed and then had (presumably simulated) sex with Donna Anna during "Non mi dir." It was scarcely surprising in the circumstances that Rutter's performance of the aria was lackluster. Donna Elvira (Claire Weston) orally serviced Leporello at the point when she mistook him for her former lover. Naturally, sex and violence are vital components of any Don Giovanni, but on this occasion, there was little room left for anything else.

Dispiriting above all was the poor quality of singing from this cast, several of whom (notably Magee and Nilon) have shown in the past how well they can deliver this music in happier circumstances, a common tendency was to shout lines, as in a play, instead of singing phrases made up of notes. Mozart seemed to have become a nuisance. But then, so had Da Ponte, with crucial elements of plot, characterization and location ignored. If Don Giovanni wears no disguise when he attempts to rape Donna Anna, how could she fail to recognize him? If Giovanni is just another lowlife, what is subversive about his class-crossing sexual escapades? If the Act I finale takes place not on his estate but in a public bar, why would the uninvited guests feel so uneasy about turning up?

There were few survivors of this dreadful evening. Weston's incipient wobble has become a problem. Nathan Berg sang Leporello and, like the rest of the cast, gave a committed visual performance but one devoid of any sense of vocal style. Linda Richardson's silvery-toned Zerlina partially made it through the mess, but Leslie John Flanagan's Masetto was purely brutish. In the pit, Joseph Swensen conducted a fast and superficial account of the so-called Prague version of the score. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the evening was the almost embarrassing eagerness to shock. Most of us were just plain bored.

The previous evening (May 30), Lesley Garrett had returned to the Coliseum in what was chronologically the second cast of a revival of Jonathan Miller's 1987 production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia. It was a rare outing onstage for a singer whose celebrity status in the U.K. has for some time been based largely on television appearances and mass, open-air concerts. (Her most recent venture was Rosina in this same production two years ago.) ...