Mozart - Don Giovanni

The Guardian 80

Soloists, MusicAeterna/Currentzis
(Sony Classical)

On the evidence of this disorientating and sometimes shocking Don Giovanni, Teodor Currentzis is to Mozart what Emma Rice is to Shakespeare: sceptical, questioning, reinventing with bright lights and vividly colourful insights. Currentzis’s Russian orchestra steals the show with its incisive approach (but sack the clever-clever fortepianist). The ensemble is superbly tight, though some of the little-known cast work better than others, with Vito Priante’s Leporello far more grabbing than Dimitris Tiliakos as Giovanni. Là ci darem la mano is reimagined as a pastoral musette, while the Serenade sounds like a ukulele ensemble; the finale is brutal, and achieves the “cold, pitiless majesty” that Hermann Abert heard in this tremendous score.