Don Giovanni
Garsington Opera, Buckinghamshire Until July 21
I enjoyed this Don Giovanni more than I have in some time because Michael Boyd’s production is modern, light and frothy, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. And a group of talented young singers have fun strutting their stuff.
Boyd, who ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for a decade in the early Noughties, makes Don part avant-garde artist, chucking paint around with gay abandon during the overture, and part lottery-winning vulgarian, dedicated to excess.
And Boyd ensures that Don plays out his crudely obsessive multiple seductions free from old-style censoriousness, contemporary #MeToo judgmentalisms or heavy-handed references to Harvey Weinstein.
Michael Boyd’s production of Don Giovanni is modern, light, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. A splendid Jonathan McGovern (above with Camila Titinger) leads the cast as Don
The unsung heroine of this venture, and so much else that’s good about Garsington, never gets to take a bow. That’s the casting director, Sarah Playfair, who once again finds a cast who look good and sing well.
Jonathan McGovern is splendid as the wide-boy Don, well matched by David Ireland’s, earthy yet charismatic Leporello. Paul Whelan, though a little light of voice, is nonetheless an effective Commendatore, and Thomas Faulkner a handsome Masetto. If ever there was a week for him to feel proud of being a dead ringer for Olivier Giroud, this was it.
The up-and-coming Welsh tenor Trystan Llŷr Griffiths is also an appealing Don Ottavio.
McGovern and the rest of the cast look good and sing well so praise is once again due to Garsington’s unsung hero: the casting director, Sarah Playfair
Many will feel the men outdistance the women in this show, but Sky Ingram, though done no favours by the wardrobe mistress, is an endearing Donna Elvira. Newcomer Camila Titinger has all the weight of voice to present a powerful Donna Anna. Best of the three, perhaps, is Mireille Asselin’s appealingly flirtatious Zerlina.
To gather together such a team without public funds is hugely creditable. If only ENO, with all its Arts Council millions, could regularly put together casts as coherent as this. But it can’t, and it doesn’t.
In the pit Douglas Boyd, an expert Mozartian, offers a fleet-footed performance that emphasises, as many don’t, Mozart’s lightness of touch in what is surely his greatest opera.
Manon Lescaut
Opera Holland Park, London Until June 26
Rating: 
This extremely well sung and conducted Manon Lescaut is well worth seeing despite a naively updated production by the inexperienced Pole Karolina Sofulak.
Manon Lescaut is a simple tale of a young girl, Manon, torn between her love for the student Des Grieux, and the riches lavished upon her by the elderly and powerful aristocrat Geronte.
Puccini, a consummate man of the theatre, knew that to be credible Geronte had to have absolute power over Manon. He therefore set it in the 18th century.
This well sung and conducted Manon Lescaut is well worth seeing despite a naively updated production. Elizabeth Llewellyn and Peter Auty (above) are excellent as Manon and Des Grieux
In Puccini’s version, Manon is transported to America and dies of thirst in the ‘deserts of Louisiana’. Here she dies in a gold lamé dress in a bar. Lots of things happen in a bar, I know, but dying of thirst is a famous first.
But go in spite of that. Go for some wonderful singing from two excellent principals: Elizabeth Llewellyn, despite laryngitis, in fine voice as Manon; Peter Auty gives Des Grieux his usual style and panache. Their duets would have raised the roof if OHP’s big tent had one.
The other two principals are similarly excellent. Stephen Richardson as Geronte does his best with what his director leaves him by way of a character.
Paul Carey Jones is an especially good Lescaut, Manon’s brother, and the source of much of the mischief in the piece, as Lescaut pursues his each-way bet between his sister’s happiness and Geronte’s money.
The hugely experienced, and surely much underrated, conductor Peter Robinson leads his excellent orchestra through a compelling and idiomatic account of Puccini’s memorable score.