``Cherchez la femme'' -- ``keep an eye on the women,'' more or less -- is the watchword of Mozart's insatiable lothario Don Giovanni, and it will do

just fine for the lumpy and rather lopsided San Francisco Opera production that opened Saturday night at the War Memorial Opera House.

It was the opera's three women, including one superb debutante (Italian soprano Monica Colonna) and two established stars (Carol Vaness and Anna Netrebko), who lent the evening whatever luster it could claim. The men, meanwhile, limped forlornly in the rear, dragging their Y chromosomes along behind them.

To be sure, sexual politics lies at the heart of ``Don Giovanni,'' with its chilling, seriocomic portrait of an inveterate womanizer. But it seemed odd to see the issue played out so starkly on the level of artistic achievement.

For the first of the company's three summer offerings (Stravinsky's ``Rake's Progress'' and Wagner's ``Parsifal'' open during the two coming weekends), general director Lotfi Mansouri has mounted what seems to be a quasi-revival of his 1995 ``Don Giovanni.'' Though it's billed as a new production, with sets by Thierry Bosquet and John Coyne and the directing credit shared by Mansouri and Graziella Sciutti, this version is not easily distinguishable from memories of its predecessor.

It still depends mostly on moving characters in and out of a large central unit space, with colonnades and balconies to be employed as needed. The opera's challenging blend of the serious and comic veins was deftly managed, even if no overarching point of view was clearly in evidence.

But what Saturday's performance lacked were the essentials of any serial seducer, no matter how dastardly: energy, vivacity, charm. Part of the problem lay with the prosaic and startlingly ineffectual conducting of Daniel Beckwith, who in his company debut proved unable to coordinate an ensemble or impart any rhythmic momentum to the score.

The bigger problem, though, was baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role, who for some reason decided to leave his considerable trove of personal and vocal charisma back in the dressing room.

It seemed clear that he and the directors had decided to forgo the familiar picture of a dashing, suavely alluring libertine. Fair enough: With his murderous temperament and joyless addiction to the chase (nowadays he would surely be a candidate for some kind of SexEnders program), Giovanni is sufficiently demonic to sustain a darker view.

A HOLE AT THE CENTER

But Hvorostovsky's saturnine, inexpressive performance simply flattened out one of opera's most vibrant characters. Moving with minimal grace, scowling throughout and singing without much in the way of either lyricism or heroic strength, he left a hole at the center of the opera.

Just once did he and Beckwith join forces to create the kind of musical energy that speaks of liberation. That was in the ``Champagne'' Aria (``Fin ch'han dal vino''), as Giovanni prepares to throw his big party, and it sizzled with sardonic anticipation in a breakneck and note-perfect rendition.

But the rest was often muted or simply weird. For ``Deh vieni alla finestra,'' the mandolin-accompanied serenade in which the Don woos a comely maidservant, Hvorostovsky launched into a strange, mellifluous bellow, as if one of the sea lions at Pier 39 had discovered a genuine musical gift and decided that opera was the right vehicle for it.

Fortunately, there were the three women to set things right. Colonna made a tremendous U.S. debut as Donna Anna, bringing to the role a combination of technical precision, dramatic power and full, open- throated sound. From the opening scene, in which she scuffles with Giovanni as he tries to leave her bedroom, through to her outpouring of grief on the murder of her father, the Commendatore, Colonna dominated the proceedings with thrilling force.

Colonna didn't quite have the serene nobility for some of Donna Anna's more restrained moments -- particularly the final ``Non mi dir,'' which sounded a little rough-hewn for all the ease with which she dispatched the aria's demanding coloratura. It made one think that she might have been better cast as the slightly unhinged Donna Elvira.

That role, however, was admirably handled by Vaness, whose singing sounds wonderfully free and secure these days. Her first aria, ``Ah! chi mi dice mai,'' was a blistering tirade of wounded vanity, and her final ``Mi tradi'' came through with all its rueful ferocity intact.

NETREBKO'S SPIRITED PEASANT

Completing this trio of Graces was Netrebko, with a gorgeous and fascinatingly dark-toned performance as the peasant girl Zerlina. Her pitch was as laser-perfect as ever, her phrasing if anything more fluid and evocative. The inclusion of Zerlina's duet with Leporello, ``Per queste tue manine,'' usually omitted with good reason, was made more than bearable by Netrebko's spirited rendition.

Baritone Alfonso Antoniozzi, who was scheduled to sing Leporello, might well have added some much-needed leavening to Hvorostovsky's glowering. But he withdrew an hour before curtain time with a cold -- whose effects were audible during the previous evening's tribute to Placido Domingo -- and Adler Fellow Philip Horst was left to carry on gamely in his stead.

Horst came through with a performance that was excellent in every respect except audibility -- of which there was essentially none. As long as no one else was singing, and the orchestra was playing pianissimo, and a listener strained very hard, one could make out a handsome vocal style to go with Horst's vivid comic display.

A more alarming failure was the debut of Gregory Turay as Donna Anna's beloved Don Ottavio. This young American tenor recently won the prestigious Richard Tucker Award, but surely not on the basis of the sort of strained, shapeless singing he displayed Saturday. The phrases were garbled, the high notes clouded and imprecise; I prefer to believe that he was coming down with a cold.

The other singers holding up the male end of things were Russian bass Stanislaw Schwets, making a nondescript U.S. debut as Zerlina's loutish sweetheart Masetto, and Reinhard Hagen as the Commendatore. He at least made an imposing presence as a man of stone.

(C) The San Francisco Chronicle, 2001

June 2000 Reviews

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