Mozart: Don Giovanni

EMI can boast a great number of excellent recordings of Don Giovanni. Back in the 1930s Fritz Busch made the first complete recording with his Glyndebourne forces. After that it took more than twenty years before a new version appeared, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and with Eberhard Wächter, Giuseppe Taddei, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Joan Sutherland among the soloists. This set, at present available in the GROC series, is regarded by many as the definitive recording. Klemperer recorded it in the mid-1960s with Nicolai Ghiaurov in the title role and a decade later Barenboim set it down with Roger Soyer as Don Giovanni and Geraint Evans as Leporello. In the 1980s EMI returned to Glyndebourne and took down Bernard Haitink’s view of this eternally fascinating masterpiece – Thomas Allen and Richard Van Allan were the Don and his servant…
– Göran Forsling, MusicWeb International

Recorded at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995, Sir Charles Mackerras led the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Chorus and an outstanding cast, including Bo Skovhus, Alessandro Corbelli, Christine Brewer, Jerry Hadley and Felicity Lott, in an insightful and scholarly performance of Don Giovanni. Renowned Mozart scholar Sir Charles Mackerras masterfully interprets one of the world's most treasured operatic masterpieces. The superb cast beautifully renders the alluring charms and heavy dramatic turns of this celebrated piece.
Stanley Sadie, Gramophone.

This thrilling recording around concert performances at the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus is set to be a milestone in at least two ways. It marks the beginning of an extended Deutsche Grammophon collaboration with rising star Yannick Nézet-Séguin – the young French-Canadian maestro - “surely the most exciting talent of his generation” (Edward Seckerson, The Independent, January, 2011) who has already been celebrated from the Metropolitan Opera House New York to Royal Opera House Covent Garden, La Scala Milan and the Salzburg Festival.

Maazel's performances appear not only on audio recordings but on film - he was the conductor for film versions of Don Giovanni (Joseph Losey's award-winning adaptation, mentioned below), Carmen and Franco Zeffirelli's interpretation of Otello.
Although primarily known as a conductor, Maazel was no stranger to composition himself, arranging material from Wagner's Ring Cycle into a 75-minute suite, The Ring Without Words, and composing an opera based on George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; and as if this were not enough, he was also an accomplished violinist (see below for a recording of his performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons)…

Don Giovanni, a libertine, a rake with a devil-may-care attitude, is portrayed magnificently by Teddy Tahu Rhodes in this Opera Australia production, where he first appears on stage in a costume where less is definitely more! Charismatic and sexy, Rhodes’ acting and singing are magnificent. His misused servant, Leporello, is played by Conal Coad, who skilfully promotes the opera’s comic elements whilst delivering a thumping bass full of drama.

This release is part of last summer’s project to record for DVD all 22 of Mozart’s operas in performances from the Salzburg Festival. This is the only one of the 22 that I have seen so far, but from the trailer, it looks like none of the productions are traditional… FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle