SANTA FE, NM—-The summer-season opera festival came up with a wealth of talent that could sing and act on an international level—-no mean feat, given the eight principals in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Hearing and seeing this drama about the fascinating, rapacious daredevil brightens the week spent in this breath-taking site 7,000 Feet up in the sky. At least until Don Giovanni, who is somewhere between Zorro, Casanova and the Lone Ranger, is ultimately dragged off to judgment and perdition in the underworld.

Yes, this is a trim ship sailing smoothly, at least if you cover your eyes. This production has however been transferred, illogically, from Spain to Victorian London and its Sherlock Holmes atmosphere, with horse-buggy whips, bustles, the feeling of fog, and both bowler hats and stovepipe hats. The Don has shelved his ubiquitous rapier, instead wielding a pistol to murder the Commendatore.

If the Spanish ambassador files a protest, I’m with him. Certainly the rustic servant Leporello is neither British gentleman nor valet. And the free-wheeling derring-do of glamorous Seville Spain is no foggy, coal-fired Britain.

Major credit for the pleasures of the current staging is SFO Music Director Harry Bicket conducting in the pit, with the most sensitive baton work imaginable down to the softest, pillowiest string sounds. He also rehearsed the many vocal ensembles bristling throughout Mozart operas, to wherein the opening murder scene’s throw-away trio of basses became a memorable landmark.

Playing the title role was bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, abetted by the servant (Nicholas Newton). Zerlina’s swain Masetto called up William Guanbo Su to woo Liv Redpath. Other sopranos were Donna Anna (Rachel Willis-Sørensen) and Donna Elvira (Rachael Wilson). Soloman Howard played the ill-fated Commandatore, and the milksop tenor Ottavio—Anna’s counselor and pet—by David Portillo.

Whatever his misfires with the London transfer, Director Stephen Barlow injected essential humor, as when Leporello reels off all the Don’s conquests around Europe while unreeling a large map, with pointers, before the aghast Elvira.

MUSIC NOTES—Prague has long contested Vienna’s claim as Mozart’s city, as this opera premiered there, and the “Marriage of Figaro” as well, had far greater success there…..Just as in the first “Giovanni,” the same bass played the dying Commendatore as his ambulatory funerary statue coming to drag Giovanni off to Hades (though in modern productions, often played by two separate singers)…The astute librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote this as well as ”Marriage,” we can almost claim as American. The Italian writer later emigrated to New York City and became a professor at Columbia University. MOZART’S OPERA “DON GIOVANNI” at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico, through Aug. 23, in Italian, with supertitles. For SFO info: For SFO info: (800) 280-4654, or online, www.santafeopera.org.

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