Critics rave about the ideal Mozart cast in the Metropolitan Opera's new 'Don Giovanni'.
Ivo van Hove's new production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" at the Metropolitan Opera features a stark and unfriendly world, but with an excellent cast and conducted with unexaggerated vitality by Nathalie Stutzmann. The set, designed by Jan Versweyveld, surrounds a court with looming concrete buildings that shift and rotate almost imperceptibly, so that you can never quite get a handle on the spaces. Peter Mattei, in the title role, still looks and sounds strikingly youthful, but his Giovanni isn’t zesty, but rather pretty serene and matter-of-fact, mostly sober but a little wry, temperamentally gray — if still a practiced, persuasive romancer.