Don Giovanni performed

How was the performance Saturday evening?

Wonderful. Everybody was in fine voice, acting up a storm.

I particularly admired Ildebrando D'Arcangelo as Leporello. This is a great "Sancho Panza" type of part. The distinctions between Quixote and Giovanni need no enumeration, but in each case we remember the pairing of an intense and extraordinary protagonist with a man-of-the-earth. In each case, the sidekick is played for laughs yet is also the source of much of the pathos of the whole.

The curtain opens to a castle, and D'Arcangelo is the only human figure we see. His character is waiting upon his master, the title character, who is up to no good inside.

D'Arcangelo introduces himself/Leporello to us in a complaint about his boss, Notte e giorno faticar . Then we hear a scream from within, and the action is underway.

Later, the Don seeks to seduce a peasant gal (Zerlina) on her wedding day. Zerlina was played by Isabel Leonard, a mezzo soprano. You'll see a photo of Leonard, though not in character, at the top of this entry. Here, by the way, is a link to a review of a recital Ms Leonard gave in March, as covered by The New York Times. There was some business with a red shoe of hers that I enjoyed.

Zerlina has to win back her fiance after a brief interlude with the Don -- not brief enough for Masetto's liking. She does the winning back by offering Masetto her shoe, and getting him to put it on her foot Prince Charming style.

That was a fine dramatization of Zerlina's character. The Don relies not upon his good looks or charm -- with women of classes lower than his own he relies for seduction upon the fact that he is a Don, and he can offer them (falsely of course) the chance to be a Dona. He plays, if you will, upon the Cinderella fantasy.

The final scenes were staged somewhat differently in this performance than I had come to expect. In the scenes of Don Giovanni that are shown in the movie Amadeus, for example, the upright graveyard statue of the deceased Commendatore comes to life and shows up at dinner at the Don's home.

But in the staging at the Met Saturday, there was no upright statue. There was only a figure lying horizontally on a coffin or coffin-like structure in the cemetery.

Nor did anything very statue-like show up at the Giovanni dinner. There was, rather, a forbidding spectral figure behind a scrim. There was always sdome ambiguity as to whether the Don and this ghost were in the same "space," even when the Don sought unsuccessfully to free his own arm from the spirit's grasp. Presumably the Don entered the ghost's world forever when the floor beneath him gave way.

All in all, a superb evening.