Mozart has grown on me in my old age. I used to find his music kind of boring. But in its simplicity is actually musical perfection as God divined. Even when writing about womanizers and their conquests his music is gorgeous. The Cattalog aria sung by Leporello is my favorite in the 3.5 hours. The music itself is interesting in that it's sometimes just singing over a sparse harpsichord line. It's kind of odd harpsichord against the brutalist backdrop of the Ivo Van Hove set. There are three pieces that rotate very slowly, so slowly and subtly that you don't even notice it until it reaches its final position. In the climactic scene when the Commendatore's ghost (or Mozart's father according to Amadeus) drags Don Giovanni down to hell there are these intense projections that look as though they're on a screen, but all of a sudden the projections turn off and I'm told they're projected straight on the set. It's a trick of the eye. From the heights of the family circle, I had a hard time telling the female characters apart. They were all dressed kind of similarly and I'd forgotten my binoculars. Could not tell that Federica Lombardi (Donna Anna) dressed in basically a nightgown was so pregnant she is just a couple weeks away from maternity leave. The singers are all universally excellent.
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