★★☆☆☆
As the curtain fell, I was in shock — and I don’t think I was alone. Not because of what Kasper Holten puts into his 2014 Mozart staging, but because of what he takes out. Originally he cut straight from Giovanni’s “death” (actually not a death in this show) to the final sextet. The Royal Opera’s revival of his production goes even farther: stopping the show altogether at Giovanni’s last cry.
There’s a scholarly half-justification for that. A Vienna performance in 1788, supervised by Mozart himself, did the same. Or perhaps it didn’t; no one knows for sure. The massive cut certainly gives the singer playing Giovanni the chance to leap straight from agonised frothing into a cheeky solo curtain-call before anyone else is