DESCRIPTION:
Don Giovanni, KV 527 (1787)
Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Librettist: Lorenzo da Ponte

Production: Peter Sellars

Don Giovanni: Eugene Perry
Leporello: Herbert Perry
Donna Elvira: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
Donna Anna: Dominique Labelle
Don Ottavio: Carroll Freeman
Zerlina: Ai Lan Zhu
Masetto: Elmore James
Commendatore: James Patterson

Wiener Symphoniker
Conductor: Craig Smith

Sung in Italian with English subtitles.

In Peter Sellars' evocative 1990 production of Don Giovanni, the setting of Mozart's drama giocoso is transformed from the aristocratic Seville of the mid 17th century to a row of broken down crack houses on a street in East Harlem in the late 1980s, when New York's long running crack-cocaine epidemic had made eerily desolate slums out of vast swaths of the city. It is here that our beloved Giovanni ekes out an existence as a junkie and street person. And yet despite his circumstances, Giovanni has an unmistakeable hunger for life, which we quickly see can manifest itself in brutal rage.