Newsday, April 2005

Bleak but uproarious, bawdy but singed with hellfire, Mozart's opera Don Giovanni is just as elusive as its title character. Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified Don Giovanni with music and desire: "a force, a wind, impatience, passion," forever ungraspable.

Don Giovanni remains ungraspable in the Metropolitan Opera's revival of last season's new production, but utterly enthralling for that. Marthe Keller's staging, deftly revised by Gina Lapinski, sets the action in back-alley Seville, a labyrinth as dark and disorderly as the passions that animate the drama.

Contradictions abound in this Don Giovanni. In the opening scene, Giovanni and Donna Anna, the woman he has ravished, sing of flight and punishment but linger in a heaving clutch, loath to let go of each other. Giovanni's serenade to Donna Elvira's maid ends as an onanistic reverie, the would-be seducer preening before his own shadow while the lady's balcony remains empty. At his journey's end, Giovanni boasts of his costly pleasures while indulging, angry and alone, in an orgy of destruction.

As cruel and alluring as a fallen angel, Gerald Finley bounds and twirls in the title role, delivering Da Ponte's peerless text with stinging vibrancy and singing with unerring elegance. His handsome bass-baritone does not boom; it floats and caresses. He is a musician's musician, spinning a satiny legato line.

Bass Samuel Ramey's Leporello seems wizened from long acquaintance with this Giovanni's searing energy, and rightly so. Ramey, too, is a princely artist. Although the bloom of youth has quit his voice, his attention to niceties of rhythm and articulation is still exemplary.

Making her Met début as Donna Anna, Tamar Iveri sings magnificently, above all in her spellbinding call to vengeance. Full and richly colored from top to bottom, Iveri's voice soars with the fire and brilliance of a fine blade, and her command of Mozart's intricate writing is sure.

Adina Nitescu, also in her house début, is an endearingly unhinged Donna Elvira. She sings sharp early on but offers a heart-wrenching account of the great recitative preceding "Mi tradì," filled with anguish and rage. A third beauty, Isabel Bayrakdarian, is a thoroughly delectable Zerlina.

As Don Ottavio, tenor Richard Croft graces his character's punishing arias with wondrously long lines and subtle shadings, although he occasionally sounds pressed. Bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu, the production's third debutant, sings with gorgeous tone. He makes the simple, put-upon Masetto the opera's moral core: an unfailingly decent fellow who, at opera's end, extends his hand in friendship to Leporello despite earlier tangles. Paata Burchuladze is an eerily black-toned Commendatore.

Conductor Philippe Jordan leads a majestic account of the score—grand but not laggard, rich-textured but not muddy. All in all, this is as splendidly sung and played a Don Giovanni as one is likely to encounter, with only five performances (and, maddeningly, no broadcast) scheduled before it, too, slips from our grasp.

DON GIOVANNI. Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. Metropolitan Opera, Philippe Jordan conducting. Through April 16 at Lincoln Center. Visit www.metopera.org or call 212-362-6000. Seen Monday.