San Francisco Classical Voice

Anna, Elvira, and Ottavio (Amy Hansen, Maureen Metté, Brian Frutiger) succeeded individually, though, as a gang of three, seemed anything but threatening. Frutiger has the pure, young tenor voice proper for “Il mio tesoro.” (“Dalla sua pace,” the extra tenor aria in act I, was omitted.) One of the evening's showstoppers came, like “Il mio tesoro,” toward the end: Hansen's exquisitely shaped recitative and Larghetto, “Non mi dir,” with the haunting clarinet duo-work particular to Mozart's last style.

In the pit were some three dozen players, the substance of the eight-year-old Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra, most obvious heir to the venerable Sacramento Symphony Orchestra. They had their own page and logo in the program along with an explanatory “Notice to Our Patrons” laying claim (properly, in my view) to legitimacy. Earlier that day, as it happened, the Sacramento Bee had run a page-one, above-the-fold exposé of the latest orchestral shenanigans in a town weary of them, and, house-side, it was of course the topic of the evening.

It took a good half the first act for the pitch to settle and for the balance and blend to work themselves out of a trumpet-and-horn oversupply. The chamber playing was very fine, notably the cello-obligato aria in act I (Zerlina's “Batti, batti”) with Susan Lamb Cook, and the cello, clarinet, bassoon aria in act II (Elvira's “Mi tradi quell'alma ingrata”). There was a flamboyantly apt crescendo from the brass just as the Don was swallowed by flames. Timm Rolek conducted a correct reading that would have profited, I believe, from a half dozen more moments of tenderness and reflection: the Romanticism that is, after all, just round the corner.

This Don Giovanni quite pleased the eye. The costumes featured for Donna Anna a stunning dark maroon and black-lace Spanish gown; for Zerlina and Masetto, a brighter peasant look with flowers for the wedding; and a good white-and-gold ball costume for the Don. The statue was superb. A single pillars-and-ramparts set was made to mutate (as Mozart and da Ponte put it) by changing the center drops, which included a spectacular evocation of the Don's garden and a good tavern, charmingly labeled “Posada,” that provided the balcony necessary for mandolin romancing.

It was a smallish production in a big house, made the more cavernous by the unrelenting moonlight-and-shadows in which Don Giovanni, forbidden torches and lanterns by the modern fire codes, must play itself out. Filling the wide stage was problematic, as the “coro di contadini e di contadine, suonatori, servitori” numbered but nine. Spectacle needed replacing by a good deal of goblet hoisting and sword brandishment. (There was gratuitous breast-fondling, too, and a wrongheaded muddling up of things by two of the Don's strumpets trying to engage Elvira in some all-girl partouze.) The celebrated act I finale, lacking its onstage bands and enough dancers to set up the three contrasting dance-styles (minuet, country-dance, allemande), left me mainly wondering where and when the gang of three had worked out the steps in their elegant carousel.

The 2,400-seat Sacramento Convention Center Auditorium was comfortably filled with an eager season-opener audience anticipating the appearance of several favorite sons and daughters, notably including Mackenzie and Soman. Around my seat the chatter continued through the overture and, too often, resumed during any number slower than Andante.