Don Giovanni

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The Greek National Opera presents Mozart’s legendary Don Giovanni in the form of a Suitcase Opera, an initiative that has been embraced by audiences all over Greece for the past two years. Suitcase Opera is a flexible and mobile production form, which allows operas to be presented at unusual venues and beyond traditional theatres, where the GNO’s star performers sing to a piano accompaniment. The performances are possible thanks to a donation from the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation within the context of the “Journey to the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre” initiative.

The GNO’s new Suitcase Opera production tells the tale of the Spanish nobleman Don Giovanni, a blasphemous libertine admired by men for his courage and by women for his scandalous reputation. Don Giovanni appears as a man without feelings, without compassion and without a sense of what is just and what is not. At the same time, however, he embodies the principles of the Enlightenment and rationalism; he has control over his destiny and desires, and defines his own fate without fear of God.

The director of the production, Alexandros Efklidis, notes:
“Don Giovanni belongs to that small core of masterpieces in the fantastic museum of contemporary Western culture, somewhere between the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, Crime and Punishment, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. However, despite the grandeur that has been assigned to it, Don Giovanni was written as a comedy for a very small stage. Scaling the opera down and reviving its comic elements were, for the Pocket Opera production, the two main goals through which to emphasise those aspects of the opera that are usually overlooked by its presentation on a grand scale. Even though achieving a reasonable duration for the circumstances meant scrapping a large part of the musical material, Mozart’s musical message comes across in pristine form. Our performance is not an interpretation of the piece. Instead, it aims to highlight the motives of the characters that flank the undisputed protagonist, Don Giovanni. Mozart, with his monumental sense of theatre and humour, endowed his characters with an incredible amount of psychological detail, which we have attempted to convey in a playful manner, adding our own brushstrokes to 18th century sensibilities and making the characters more affable to a modern-day audience. Our production, moreover, has done away the metaphysical features that are so often prevalent in the opera. It presents the characters in the context of the here and now, which is why we decided to strip them of their rococo frills and, instead, show them as they would be today. The aim was not just to make them more familiar, but, rather to make them easier to understand.”