UC Santa Barbara Opera Theatre and the Department of Music have made a new performance on video of Europe’s greatest opera, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni, K 527” (1787), which will be presented as a YouTube premiere at 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 26.
The performance and video of the abridged opera were directed by associate Professor Isabel Bayrakdarian, and stars Valdis Jansons (Don Giovanni, Leporello), April Amante (Donna Anna), Naomi Merer (Donna Elvira), Gianni Becker (Don Ottavio), Marta Hovhannisyan (Zerlina), and Steven BrowningThomson.
Megan Ashley, Tyler Fulgham, Violet Joy Hansen, Keith Romero, Soohyun Ryu, Kartik Sundaram, and Matthew Thayer make up the chorus. Pianists John Ballerino and Erik Lawrence will provide the orchestra.
The opera will be sung in the original Italian with English surtitles, and the video will be free and available to the public via the Department of Music’s YouTube channel www.tinyurl.com/ucsbmusicyoutube.
Students in the UCSB Opera Theatre Program began to prepare for the novel production in the fall. They rehearsed and later recorded scenes in their homes, and in locations all over the U.S., with some students as far away as Italy and South Korea.
The remote format challenged the students both musically and technologically, requiring them to learn recording techniques and become familiar with new equipment.
Bayrakdarian, who adapted her own performances to a virtual format at the start of the pandemic, says, “Directing this opera during the pandemic — and presenting it virtually — posed many challenges, but it also offered the rare chance to assign the dual roles of Don Giovanni and Leporello to the same singer, thus alluding to the notion that the servant and his master are alter-egos, opposite sides of the same person.
“This opera has a timeless quality, and it’s a great psychological thriller. Having sung the role of Zerlina in countless productions around the world, from the Salzburg Festival to the Metropolitan Opera, it’s an incredible honor for me to be able to pass on the experience and knowledge that I learned from the greatest conductors and stage directors, back to the new generation of singers and to our talented UCSB voice students.”
My friend and mentor, the late Michael Ingham — internationally-admired baritone, UCSB professor, sometime chairman of the Music Department and director of the Opera Program — once told me of his belief that Mozart never relinquished his dream of becoming a famous opera seria composer — speculation that would appear to be born out by the fact that one of the composer’s last completed works was one of the breed: “La clemenza di Tito” (1791).
Alas for Mozart’s fugitive hopes, “La clemenza,” though it contains many lovely passages, soon vanished into the same obscurity that had engulfed “Idomeneo,” “Il re pastore,” and his other stillborn essays in the seria genre.
Opera seria flourished during the baroque era, and while Mozart’s conservative side may have cherished a vision of himself as a baroque composer, his genius belonged to the later 18th century, a time of satire and revolution. Indeed, he belonged to the revolutionary brotherhood of Freemasonry.
One of his most popular works, “The Marriage of Figaro,” was based on the play by Beaumarchais that many reactionaries explicitly cited as one of the causes of the French Revolution.
The libretto of “The Marriage of Figaro,” like that of “Don Giovanni” and “Così fan tutte,” was written by the Italian, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte was a genius, too, in his own way. His collaborations with Mozart are as magical as they are unique, although he wrote 38 libretti in all, including several for Mozart’s alleged rival, Antonio Salieri, protagonist of the egregious “Amadeus.”
Mozart and Da Ponte were soul mates, and Mozart sponsored Da Ponte’s induction into the Masons.
For more information on the UCSB Opera Theatre’s virtual production of “Don Giovanni,” visit www.music.ucsb.edu/news/event/2171.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.