Word: leporello
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other roles run from the accomplished but not overdone leporello of Jose van Dam to Kenneth Riegel's wooden Don Ottavio. Among the women, Kiri Te Knawa's Donna Elvira stands out as the most musically agile and dramatically subtle. Edda Moser afflicts Donna Anna with an unfocused voice and the worst of operatic mannerisms--especially ludicrous with instant translation in English subtitles. She shrieks and sways--the subtitle reads, "I'm fainting." She shrieks once again and staggers to embrace a marble column--"I'm dying...
There is a glint of extravagant humor in the recital of the Don's conquests by his servant Leporello, with the list stretching down the steps of his house and out into the garden; but José Van Dam's engaging Leporello is scarcely allowed to become the buffo scalawag that Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Edda Moser as Donna Anna, Teresa Berganza as Zerlina, Kenneth Riegel as Don Ottavio, all throw themselves into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey...
...Ustinov allowed no cast bows after individual arias, no curtain calls at the end of Act I, and only one curtain call at the finale. Fine for the show, but a bit of a sacrifice for the exemplary cast (notably Roger Soyer as the don, Sir Geraint Evans as Leporello, and Heather Harper as Elvira) and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. Only seven years after rearranging a notable piano career to include the baton, Barenboim, 30, made an impressive operatic debut at Edinburgh, bringing forth from the English Chamber Orchestra a powerfully humane and often witty reading ideally geared to Ustinov...
...action revolves around the licentious exploits of a Don Juan figure, Don Giovanni in the Italian: Raymond Hickman makes a strong, swaggering, insolent libertine whose singing suggests an appropriate mocking tone whether in love or rage. The Don's servant, Leporello, is usually caricatured as an inoffensive jester. As played by Daniel Windham, easily the finest actor of the cast, he became a figure of great sensitivity and dignity. Windham's basso was round and distinct, his stage movements expressive and natural...