Iván Fischer's Don Giovanni

Less is more is apparently Iván Fischer’s creed and he demonstrated it admirably in his Don Giovanni (Prague version, 1787), in a staged concert as a part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, for which he directed the singers and conducted the orchestra. The production had the singers lightly costumed in street clothes with no sets and props but with sixteen young actors, recruited from the Budapest Acting Academy, all sprayed ashen gray from the top of the head to the tip of the limbs to look like statues who arranged themselves on the stage singly and in groups. Through the opera they rearranged themselves to suit the production needs, serving as a set (for example the window where Elvira appears), a prop (for example the banquet table to which the Commendatore is invited, and as the chorus (for example, in the ballroom scene where some members of the orchestra appear on stage as musicians). Without sets and props, the orchestra and the singers were duly foregrounded to good effect, Don Giovanni, discovered by the Commendatore, instead of injuring him in a duel, pushes a statue group over him; and the “living” statues close in on Don Giovanni at the finale and devour him with much more horrific effect than the the hell fire. Fischer conducted the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the cast of fine singers somewhat with more brawn than grace and this made Don Giovanni more a villain than a playboy and his accusers more ferocious, all for a more vigorous drama. Fischer teaches us that so much can be accomplished with a fraction of the cost of the spectacular full productions, so dear to the Met and yet too often so self-defeating however grand they may be.