Santa Fe Opera 2: Victorian Delights

Don Giovanni last appeared on the stage of the Santa Fe Opera in 2016, and while that production was unquestionably entertaining – as Don Giovanni so often is – the new production at this year’s summer season was superior in every way: the staging, directed by Stephen Barlow, offered an intriguing transposition of the story from seventeenth-century Seville to Victorian London, but it was the energetic musical direction of Harry Bicket and the dedication of a uniformly strong ensemble cast that kept Mozart’s score at the centre of the evening.

Although Don Giovanni continues to flourish in meticulously-realised period stagings, Da Ponte’s libretto – based on a tale which had already received countless retellings since its earliest written appearance in the 1630s – is flexible enough that it can work equally well in all manner of…