After an enforced season in production wilderness, Scottish Opera has a lot of artistic credibility riding on its new Don Giovanni. While it would be good to report that the production is a triumph, the result is rather more mixed. Director Tim Albery has a sinister vision of the Mozart/Da Ponte opera as a series of encounters that take place on the road as the Don wanders from one conquest to the next. In practice, this translates to a single set of a red damask many-doored wall behind a steeply inclined, cracked tarmac road. It's a confusing juxtaposition of images that seems to be neither one thing nor another. The road splits, San Andreas fault style, to receive Don Giovanni into hell in what is dramatically the most effective moment in the production by far.
As the Don, Peter Savidge is a creepy figure, skulking in the shadows, vampiric in evening dress and scraped-back hair. This is an interesting idea (even if it makes it difficult to see why all the women should find him so irresistible), though it is one the production fails to capitalise on by not providing contrasting light for all this shade.
Don Giovanni might be a drama giocoso, but it is one that Albery has decreed should be played without laughs, a decision that puts James Rutherford as Leporello in an awkward position as he attempts to inject weight and seriousness into numbers such as the catalogue aria. Hilton Marlton and Maria Costanza Nocentini make heavy work of Don Ottavio and Donna Anna but Henrikka Grondahl is an unusually restrained and noble Donna Elvira. The evening's standout performance is from D'Arcy Bleiker, who brings a vibrancy to Masetto that most of the other characters lack - this is a production defined by a lumpen sense of inertia. Where it should sparkle, such as in the peasant's party scene, it is flat, something not helped by choppy direction from Richard Armstrong in the pit. Only when he relaxes the pace at the beginning of the second act is the real musical quality of the playing and some of the singing allowed to shine through.
· In rep until June 1. Box office: 0141-240 1133. Then touring.
