Nevill Holt Opera’s Don Giovanni review – Al Fresco opera at its finest
What’s this? No opera house? A hanger, a ha-ha and three blocks of tiered seating instead. Smug cowards (me) undercover facing the orchestra. Stoic cheapskates ranked either side, braving dull Leicestershire skies, potential downpours, fingers nervously hovering on golf umbrella quick-release buttons.
Welcome to Covid Holt Hall, country house opera in the great outdoors. David Ross, whose fortune stems from Carphone Warehouse, owner of the mellow 13th-century sprawl set in rolling countryside, tackled tight distancing requirements head-on by deciding early to shutter his beautiful, refurbished stable-block auditorium and opt for al fresco. Less chance of cancellation. Other organisers may yearn for 2022. The Nevill Holt show would go on in 2021, regardless.
And, so it has, with a season of Verdi’s La Traviata and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The result is a triumph against all odds. Don Giovanni is on stage for my visit. Except, there is no stage. The action takes place on a grassy knoll, a sizeable Neolithic mound set in front of the massive Meccano kit gazebo housing the orchestra. Entrances and exits are ramps – stage front, left and right. This is opera in the round. Think of London’s Globe Theatre, but after an extensive makeover by Alan Titchmarsh and the Ground Force team.
Then, the scenery. Hang on. There is no scenery. And isn’t there the small problem of hearing singers in the open air? Is that twenty-plus speakers I see bolted to the stockade supporting the sides of the ha-ha? Without the focused forward acoustics of a well-designed auditorium, assisted sound production, complete with potentially distracting face mikes for the singers, was inevitable.
The last miked opera performance I saw was Monir Elweseimy’s The Sea Treasures in Muscat in January 2020. Voices were disembodied and the sound system out of synch with the singers — bad omens from Oman. Opera purists brook no electronic interference.
This worked. Mark Rogers, Nevill Holt’s Sound Designer, commissioned Southby Productions to provide the sound system. d&b Soundscape was the chosen software system. It proved nothing short of miraculous. Voices followed each singer as they traversed the mound, or while ascending and descending the ramps.
The “kit” was unobtrusive, including the face mikes. Without reading the programme, it would have been challenging to know the sound was being processed at all. Synchronisation was millisecond sharp. The balance between orchestra and singers was well maintained. Voices held their natural timbre. No hint of amplification, as there is in pounding West End musicals.
The d&b Soundscape is “sound as you feel it, sound as you feel it, sound as it is meant to be”. The sound processor is driven by algorithms derived from the acoustics of celebrated performance venues. The experience was uncanny.
Two niggles about the set-up. The singers were necessarily out of the conductor’s eye line. Not unreasonably, Finnegan Downie Dear – clearly James Joyce’s favourite conductor – chose to face his orchestra. Occasional blips in tempi were the inevitable result. And when singers naturally turned from the audience, their voices carried on regardless. No doubt some techy is working in their basement on software to cure that glitch as I write.
No niggles about the staging. Director Jack Furness, Designer Alex Berry and Movement Director Jenny Ogilvie showed true genius in driving the action across the unconventional open space. Don Giovanni is a fast opera, rapid scene changes, impersonations – Leporello, the long-suffering manservant kitted out as his master, to deceive Donna Elvira. Misunderstandings abound. There is a masked party and, at the finale, the coming alive of the murdered Commendatore’s statue.
There can be no doubt about Don Giovanni’s street-cred. The opera has been onstage for 240 years. No synopsis for regular opera-goers is required here. But, in the interests of non-opera fans, just think ITV’s Love Island, only the dirty Don has a monopoly on choosing the women. No half measures. He scores with all of them.
Especially in Spain. “Ma in Spagna son già mille e tre”, (but in Spain, one thousand and three) – according to manservant Leporello’s “Catalogue” aria. We like to think of ourselves as politically correct today, but as early as 1787, molesting aristo bounders were being pilloried, ending up in hell.
In the most recent production I have seen pre Nevill Holt – this year’s Kasper Holten, Covent Garden show – the drama was constricted by the confines of a tight set, tending towards sequences of Whitehall farce entrances and exits. The Nevill Holt production breathed freely in comparison.
Great use was made of the chorus, on and off ha-ha. Atop the grassy knoll, the performing space seemed limitless. The final scene, when the Commendatore’s statue is invited to supper, challenges Don Giovanni to repent, and condemns him to hell when he doesn’t, was especially effective.
The Commendatore rose menacingly from a trapdoor in the grass – the mound has a trap room – then promenaded round the audience with ominous steadiness towards the Don’s fatal supper encounter.
Too often have I seen Don Giovanni perish in faux-flickering flames behind voile curtains. At Nevill Holt, he was kitted out in a straw rig, previously used by Leporello at the masked ball, and escorted off stage. So far so tame.
Then, in defiance of prissy health and safety regulations, somewhere behind the right grandstand there erupted Leicestershire’s very own Burning Man spectacle. In the gathering evening dusk, the impact was stunning. And what a backdrop for the epic sextet, “I told you so” ensemble that closes the opera.
The dress was 17th-century. More realistic fustian than court splendid. That suited the rural setting well and allowed the power dynamics between the different classes of character to emerge clearly. The nuptial rituals of Zerlina and Masetto were used as a virtuous rustic backbone around which the rest of the corrupting plot hung.
I am a sucker for Don Giovanni. It was once described in The Musical Times as “outliving all its contemporaries, to live on in undiminished glory.” That was in the October 1887 edition, marking its 100th anniversary. The work is as spellbinding as ever today.
Part of Mozart’s genius is to share glorious arias across the cast of flawed characters. Let’s face it. Don Ottavio, betrothed to the dumped Donna Elvira – who can’t shake off the Don’s fatal attraction – is a cuckolded plonker. Yet, in his Dalla sua pace (From its peace) aria, he is privileged to deliver five minutes of the most sublime music in all opera.
The tapestry of comedy woven throughout Da Ponte’s libretto was expertly exploited in this production. The expertly timed, eminently readable super titles allowed the audience to grasp every nuance.
Including the wonderful moment – often buried in the whirlwind action at the end – when hapless Ottavio turns to Elvira after Giovanni’s immolation and says, “To console you, now we can be wed”, and she replies, “Um, let’s wait a year then see”.
Don Giovanni holds her in his power even beyond the grave. This production delivered all the comedic lines with vim. The audience got them all. Nevill Holt is about more than excellent opera production. It is the home of The David Ross Foundation, encouraging young artists and supporting projects providing greater access to the arts. In the car park afterwards, I chatted to some fellow opera-goers. They were, without exception, local. They were amazed to learn that I had travelled “all the way from London” to “their” opera house.
They regarded Nevill Holt as their domain – its gardens, sculptures and architecture accessible, enhancing their lives. Everyone was aware of the Foundation’s work. Of course, David Ross has been recently mired in controversy over his successful £12.8m bid for the Royal Opera House’s (ROH) David Hockney portrait of Sir David Webster, ROH’s chief Executive from 1945 – 1971.
I don’t want to rehash the controversy in detail, but the problem was that David Ross was Chairman of the ROH at the time and didn’t tell anyone he was bidding. Subsequently, his generous intention to preserve the portrait for the ROH on a permanent loan got lost in “conflict of interest” shoutiness. Ross resigned.
Perhaps the whole affair could have been more tactfully handled. However, not one of his fellow directors stood up for their Chairman, who, unlike any of them, was prepared to spend £12.8m of his fortune in a public auction to preserve an essential part of ROH heritage for Covent Garden – was a disgrace.
Look from the other side of the mirror. If a David Ross, nothing to do with the ROH, had bought the Hockney, then loaned it to the house, would there have been even a raised eyebrow? The grateful stampede to invite him to join the board would likely have been indecent. The trouble was, Ross calls a Hockney a Hockney and had not gone down well with more sensitive board colleagues, hence the carefully orchestrated harrumphs and ultimate defenestration.
More time for Nevill Holt then. Opera action does not close with the end of the summer season. The 2021 Foundation Artists initiative will bring five places for sixth form and recent school leavers in the chorus. The Young Artists programme has worked with over 160 aspiring performers since 2013.
The talent on display for this performance of Don Giovanni, much of it homegrown, was of the highest order. Watching the action unfold on that unconventional grassy knoll, there was a real sense among the audience they were discovering opera’s stars of tomorrow.
I hope the weather holds for 2022.