Excerpt:
"A magnificent performance...Amarillo Opera's production shuffled back and forth between comedy and drama - and laughs and horror...(there were) wonderfully skilled performances across the board...Conductor Stephen Dubberly brought a masterful touch to the orchestra, and stage director Benjamin Spierman drew out solid acting from the singers."
By CHIP
chip.chandler@amarillo.com
The
For such a vile adulterer, Don Juan sure was a philanthropic chap.
His prodigious romantic life wasn't the result of an unquenchable lust. No, no, he would argue. Instead, he slept with every woman who crossed his path because of his soft-hearted nature.
"If I were faithful to one, that would be cruel to all the others," he sings in a crucial moment in "Don Giovanni," Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's classic setting of the Don Juan story in opera form.
Quite the charming rogue, hmm? Well, certainly. And if it's hard to reconcile the fact that Don Giovanni - which we'll call him, to be consistent with the opera - was also a rapist and a murderer ... well, that's almost the point. He was surprisingly easy to forgive throughout most of Amarillo Opera's magnificent performance of the Mozart opera Saturday.
"Don Giovanni," one of the few operas the company has attempted in the original language, is a passionate work - fitting, considering the title character.
Perhaps paralleling the audience's love-hate relationship with Don Giovanni, AO's production shuffled back and forth between comedy and drama - and laughs and horror.
The audience's pure pleasure in the work is due in large part, of course, to the brilliance of Mozart's work.
But Saturday's success owed much to the wonderfully skilled performances across the board.
This production featured one of the most well-rounded casts in AO's history. The company is attracting some powerfully gifted guest artists - returning ones, like Matthew Trevino and Elizabeth King, and new finds like Christopher Burchett, Jayoung Yoon and, particularly, Christopher Holmes in the title role.
Holmes' powerful, yet mellow baritone helped make his roguery palatable to the audience.
Other highlights included the delightfully sarcastic Burchett as Don Giovanni's manservant, Leporello; King, Yoon and Caprice Corona as three women loved and left by the cad; and Trevino as the terrifying reminder of Don Giovanni's iniquities.
Conductor Stephen Dubberly brought a masterful touch to the orchestra, and stage director Benjamin Spierman drew out solid acting from the singers.