Monday, November 20, 2006

The "Don Giovanni" that the Maryland Opera Studio presented over the weekend (and to be repeated tomorrow evening) at the Clarice Smith Center was stripped of sets, props, lavish costumes and full orchestration. All those voids only made more vivid the mix of buffa and tragic exploitation that Mozart's opera immortalized.

Director Leon Major set the opera in a sort of timeless Mexico, peopled with masters and servants, which suited the machismo aspects of the libretto and made sense of costumes that were either black (for mourning) or white. Miah Im, who conducted a string quartet augmented by a piano and two French horns, accompanied the recitatives on a fortepiano, and only in the Commendatore's damning of Don Giovanni to hell were the trombones and other instrumental colors really missed.

The singers were all from the Opera Studio program (part of the University of Maryland music department) and well-suited to their roles. Baritone Darren Perry was an outstanding Don Giovanni, by turns charming and disgusting, vocally strong and a fine actor. Baritone VaShawn Savoy McIlwain's well-sung and -acted Leporello was both appealing and appalling, and Megan McCall was a sympathetic Donna Anna. The oft-duped pair of Abigail Wright as Zerlina and Matt Osifchin as Masetto were well-matched and wonderfully sympathetic, and David Fry's Commendatore, James Biggs's Don Octavio and Adria McCulloch's Donna Elvira were believable and attractive.

The strength of this production was in the balance of the music and the drama. With little to distract from what was happening onstage, the music and the plot seemed more closely dependent than usual, and fine performances projected the power of the story.

-- Joan Reinthaler