The first production by Benevolence Opera Project took place on Friday evening at the Redwood Theatre. It was a benefit for the Redwood Shelter for women and children fleeing abuse. One could argue that the choice of Mozart’s Don Giovanni was a bit odd in the circumstances but it certainly got conversation going around the issues!

It was quite an unusual presentation. It was much abridged. I wasn’t keeping close track but I think there was about two hours of music and narration versus the usual three hours. To compress it this much it was staged as a series of scenes with a chess themed linking narration written and performed by Ryan Hofman. There was no chorus and it was piano score with Brahm Goldhamer at the keyboard. Mostly sung in Italian (with English surtitles) there were some interpolated bits of English dialogue.

It worked pretty well. I suspect people who didn’t know the opera would have been easily able to follow the action and the more knowledgeable could play “guess the cut”. I didn’t enumerate the cuts in detail but they included a much shorter party scene (no chorus so of course), no “Batti, batti” again, of course. There was a much shortened graveyard scene, and the ending was quite abrupt; just from Donna Elvira’s entrance to Don Giovanni’s demise. Still, pretty satisfying and coherent.

There were some excellent performances and quite clever use of the limited staging resources of the Redwood. Alexander Hajek was a suitably swaggering Don and sang with power and style backed up by a fairly restrained Leporello in Luke Noftall. To be fair to him, catalogue aria aside many of his best bits were cut! The Donnas were an interesting pair. Holly Chaplin was a powerful presence as Donna Anna and the surprise (to me at least) was Mary Ferrari as Elvira. Subsequent research shows a coloratura soprano with quite a lot of experience around the world but I’d not seen her before. She’s really good; stage presence, power and style and, on the one occasion she got to show it off, impressive coloratura. Cameron Mazzei completed the masked trio as Don Ottavio. He sang sweetly and stylishly.

Kathryn Rose Johnston, as Zerlina, and James Coole-Stevenson made an attractive and well matched couple even though both roles were missing key bits. Aside from “Batti, batti”, the whole rigmarole where Masetto explains to the disguised Don Giovanni how they are going to catch and kill him was replaced by the Don socking him over the head with a Scrabble set! (à la Operamania). Andrew Tees made the most of the very attenuated Commendatore role singing with great presence and power.

All in all it felt like an effective use of limited resources coupled with better singing than one might perhaps expect. And it was all in a good cause. And should you be minded to donate, here’s the link.

Photo credit: Noah Waters