Paulo Szot Goes to Hell

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Paulo Szot in Don Giovanni, Dallas Opera

We have already written a lot about Washington National Opera's revival of John Pascoe's staging of Don Giovanni, with reviews by me on opening night and by Robert R. Reilly mid-run. The production has only one remaining performance, this Saturday, but Ionarts went back to the Kennedy Center Opera House for the penultimate performance on Tuesday night. Few of my thoughts about the staging or the singers changed as a result, except that more details in Pascoe's direction stood out this time around. Barbara Frittoli's Donna Elvira impressed me more in the second viewing, not because she seemed vocally any more ideal but because the character's sincere love for Don Giovanni is so touching. As noted in my previous review, Frittoli quite believably tries to follow Don Giovanni into hell: this time, I noticed that Pascoe places her there with Don Giovanni, in that dumbshow glimpse into the character's future suffering in hell during the overture. It also dawned on me this time that Donna Elvira is Don Giovanni's best chance at redemption (thus Pascoe's inclusion of two statues of the Madonna in the staging). He mocks her offer of salvation in the terzetto "Ah! taci, ingiusto core," near the opening of Act II, when he fakes atonement to take advantage of Elvira's hopes of a life together with him. Some of the musical phrases of this false act of contrition are eerily echoed in the damnation scene, as the stone guest repeatedly asks Don Giovanni if he repents. Don Giovanni, of course, is able only to play at repenting.

The reason, however, to take in this performance was to hear the secondary casting of Paulo Szot in the title role. The Polish-Brazilian baritone debuted the Don at Dallas Opera in 2010, but the role was not a good match for him, as Mike Silverman noted in a spot-on review for the Associated Press ("baritone Paulo Szot in the title role is vocally underpowered and only intermittently effective"). Here in Washington, too, Szot was both vocally and physically uncomfortable, covered much of the night by other singers and the orchestra and, for all his vaunted good looks, mostly awkward in the dancing and other situations. Szot has had surprisingly good luck in being featured at the Met, although ultimately he had a vocally weak debut in Shostakovich's The Nose, followed by a withdrawn Escamillo on the opening night of Carmen last year. Perhaps not surprisingly, he first gained considerable notoriety when he was cast as Emile de Becque in a rare Broadway revival of South Pacific, and he may be more comfortable with microphone in hand as a nightclub singer, for which he has received not one but two embarrassingly slobbery profiles in the New York Times. The worst part of the cinematization of opera is that favorable closeups are trumping vocal considerations in casting, a trend that will hopefully not bring us a production starring Szot sometime in the future.