Don Giovanni from Odesa tours Europe
Serhii Proskurnia, former director of the Odesa National Opera and Ballet Theater, has arranged for a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni for the press and engaged his new brainchild — the New Odesa Opera Theater.
“It is a company with limited liability. And its entire limited liability rests with me,” Proskurnia told The Day. “I’m its founder, and its capital assets are 100 percent mine. So I invite the managers, directors, artists, and performers myself.”
In the New Odesa Opera Proskurnia is going to realize the model he tried to implement in the Opera Theater, but was rejected by its staff. The cast in Don Giovanni is international. It includes singers from seven countries — Austria, Holland, Germany, the US, Poland, Finland, and Ukraine. Proskurnia says the Odesa mayor’s office has not given a penny to the project, and so it was entirely funded by the International Opera Foundation.
Actors were selected as a result of casting held in Odesa and Amsterdam. The mayor’s advisor said 180,000 euro were spent to stage Don Giovanni. According to Proskurnia, it took five hours to install the three tons worth of sets for the staging.
Thirty-two Odesa musicians from the Theater of Music Comedy and a number of students take part in the performance. The orchestra started its rehearsals on August 14, and the soloists went on stage when they already knew the score and had experience in staging Mozart’s works.
Don Giovanni was premiered on September 22 in the Hague’s Royal Theater, where it opened the new season. This will be followed by a tour around Belgium and Spain. Proskurnia promised that it will also come to Odesa. In the finale, instead of dying for his sins the great seducer Don Juan rises from the dead and runs away. This interpretation surprised the “right” characters.
“Sins are left unpunished in the play. If men were punished for having too many women, many male spectators would feel sad,” said director Frank Berndt Gottschalk explaining his concept, “People want to come closer to God by tabooing sinfulness, but this is where they fall into a trap.”
However, the greatest controversy arose over Don Juan’s image. In the play, he is not a fatal handsome man — this part is played by a bald-headed and short actor.
In the Odesa version of Don Giovanni, Proskurnia showed his creative approach to classical works and continued implementing his credo on stage: the theater should surprise the audience — and it did indeed!
