Mafioso style: Gerald Finley as Don Giovanni

It started well enough, with a deliberately unannounced blackout and – bang! – those fearsome, fateful chords calling everyone to attention. The message was clear: this performance aimed to grip its audience and not let go. Good intentions, for sure, but from that point onwards, Glyndebourne’s first Don Giovanni in 10 years went steadily downhill until, early in the second act, Giovanni sang himself to sleep with the slowest Serenade in history, taking most of his audience with him. What on paper looked a sure winner – the director, Jonathan Kent, had talked of a “white-knuckle rollercoaster ride” – ended up looking and sounding extremely tame.

Mozart’s dramma giocoso is so open to interpretation, probably more than any other opera, that it can withstand virtually any setting. Noting that the piece was composed at a “hinge moment” in European social and cultural history, Kent updates the action to somewhere around 1960, a similarly potent “hinge-moment” with greater resonance today. The locale changes, too, from Da Ponte’s “city in Spain” to the Rome of Fellini and Fornasetti – a world of silver cigarette cases, 1950s fashions and street corners at night, in which Giovanni, a Mafioso-style psychopath in white tuxedo and scarf, finds a natural home. Paul Brown’s set, a revolving stone citadel with façades inspired by Piranesi and Giulio Romano, opens like a box of tricks, yielding all sorts of murky perspectives.

So far so sensible – but wasn’t life in 1960 rather innocent? Gerald Finley’s rapier-voiced Giovanni may have women gagging for him, but he is as threatening as Cliff Richard’s Bachelor Boy, and we end up feeling rather protective of him. Everyone else in Kent’s scenario behaves as they would in a run-of-the-mill production, rendering the change of setting curiously inert. At least in “traditional” productions there is a degree of wit. Here, the ensembles are as dull as Giovanni’s party, and we are left wondering why Act One ends with a cheap flame show and what the sustained snowfall means in Act Two. Barring the opening blackout, there’s not a single coup de théâtre, least of all in a cramped and complicated finale.

Glyndebourne misguidedly opts for the version Mozart provided for Vienna in 1788, a year after the Prague premiere. The little known Leporello-Zerlina duet in Act Two merely holds the action up, and the addition of Elvira’s ‘Mi tradì’ mercilessly exposes Kate Royal’s weaknesses: struggling to bulk up her voice, she sounds ragged and tremulous, and the characterisation is blank.

The omission of Ottavio’s second aria, by contrast, is a missed opportunity for William Burden, who rids the character of wimpishness and turns “Dalla sua pace”into a show-stopper. That’s the evening’s musical highlight, unless you count Luca Pisaroni’s wonderfully conversational way with the recitatives, lighting up the text in a way only an Italian can. Exactly which language Anna Samuil’s anodyne Donna Anna is singing is hard to tell, but Anna Virovlansky’s liberated Zerlina, more 1970 than 1960, is a hit and Guido Loconsolo makes a suitably oafish Masetto. Alastair Miles’s Commendatore is anonymous – another fault of the production. Barring the soporific Serenade, Vladimir Jurowski keeps the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on a tight leash but stops too often to let the audience applaud, undermining the intended rollercoaster effect. There are also problems of co-ordination with the offstage music, which jars with the 1960 setting. Glyndebourne has tried hard with this Don Giovanni, to little avail: Mozart’s masterpiece proves as elusive as ever. () www.glyndebourne.com