MUSIC REVIEWS : San Diego Opera’s ‘Don Giovanni’ Lacks Staging Finesse Under Weber

It was not a great day for refined drama when San Diego Opera presented Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Civic Theatre on Saturday.

Director Wolfgang Weber decided to embellish the obvious as well as to add a few punctuation marks of his own. He established Don Giovanni’s philandering and disreputable character, for instance, beyond the action already provided by librettist and composer.

This Don began ogling and courting the maid Donna Elvira even while Elvira was singing “Ah! chi mi dice mai.”

He also walked around Zerlina to get a view of her from behind and play with her ear even before getting rid of Masetto.

The vulgarity was catching.

Leporello pawed the fur on Elvira’s cloak during his Catalogue Aria. Peasant couples who had passed out and others who were busy talking and embracing framed Zerlina and Masetto as they reconciled (“Batti, batti”). The peasants also were burlesqued as they aped their social betters, trying to imitate the minuet danced by the three Masqueraders.

Weber treated Elvira as a generally comic figure, worthy of evoking little pathos. She capitulated to Leporello as the disguised Don sooner and--typically here--more broadly than the text indicates. She could hardly keep her hands off him in the following garden scene.

Little wonder, then, that when she announced at the end of the opera that she would enter a convent, members of the audience laughed. They had been conditioned to.

Most problematic of all, however, was Weber’s treatment of the Commendatore in the final scene. Not only did the statue of the slain man never move--he stood upstage throughout, despite Leporello’s (and Mozart’s) description of his heavy steps--Don Giovanni never clasped his deadly hand, even though he said he did.

The Don played out virtually the whole struggle with the statue about 20 feet away from it. So it looked a little loony when he tore open his shirt, gasped for breath and rolled on the floor before making a final rush at the statue and exiting.

That’s one way of getting him offstage without having to open a pit at his feet, but it did contradict Leporello’s description of what happened to him.

Under the circumstances, one could be grateful for the generally high level of singing.

Ferruccio Furlanetto may be better known for his Leporello than for his Don, although he has sung both roles. (He sang Leporello for the first time at the Salzburg festival under Karajan in 1987.) Here he sang with dark vocal power and amplitude but unfortunately not much subtlety. More disturbingly, Furlanetto’s Don was more crude and menacing than irresistibly suave.

Dean Peterson complemented him as a robust, rustic Leporello.

As Donna Elvira, Patricia Schuman sang with agile security but grew increasingly narrow and hard-edged. Rita Cullis negotiated the virtuoso demands of Donna Anna with coolish poise. As Don Ottavio, Hans Peter Blochwitz made intelligent use of a refined, warm and slender tenor and cut a heroic figure.

Emily Manhart was a spunky, dark-toned Zerlina, misdirected to make herself overly susceptible to Giovanni. Victor Ledbetter was an uncommonly sympathetic Masetto, touchingly helpless in his awareness of his low social status.

The veteran John Macurdy made an imposing Commendatore but had to suffer the indignity of sounding virtually absent in the final scene because of his offstage placement.

Here, too, the earlier realistic scene paintings that had enlivened Carl-Friedrich Oberle’s plaster-plain sets, created for the Houston Grand Opera, ineffectively gave way to outer-space images of pulsing, swirling nebulae.

Conductor Edoardo Muller emphasized propulsion and urgency at the expense of lyric expression, but he did bring the opera in at about 3 1/4 hours.

Incidental intelligence: The supertitles used are owned by Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa, and it’s a relief to know that they extend through the final scene, which Opera Pacific cut when it presented “Don Giovanni” in 1990.