Scottish Opera leads Roland Wood and Jonathan McGovern will both perform the title role of Don Giovanni when the production comes to Inverness and Aberdeen

Baritones Roland Wood and Jonathan McGovern are sharing the role of the ultimate womanising anti-hero Don Giovanni in Scottish Opera’s revived production of Mozart’s opera.

It arrives at Eden Court on Tuesday – with Roland in the role – and will go to Aberdeen from June 16 to 18 where Jonathan will step into Don Giovanni's flowing coat and mask. The two share the dates at the Festival theatre in Edinburgh.

Roland's first encounter with Don Giovanni came in 2008, but he had understudied the part for Scottish Opera in 2001.

Jonathan performed parts of the role while he was at college in the mid-90s,before getting his first chance to actually sing as Don Giovanni in 2019 for a production at Garsington Opera.

In the week before the opera company headed north, the two baritones got together to share their thoughts on Don Giovanni, the man and – these days – is it not the ultimate non-PC role to play?

“I don’t agree personally,” said Roland, offering Inverness audiences this week his Don.

“I think he is a character who has things imposed upon him. People want to use the piece to say certain things and advocate their agenda. I don’t think Giovanni is different to men in any period.

“He is a product of his upbringing, of a privileged upper class.

“To him there are no consequences to his actions because he comes from a tradition of privilege.

“I don’t think that has changed since the stories of Don Juan started being written.

“ You just have to look at our current Cabinet or a premier league footballer or an actor to see that people in positions of wealth are accorded positions of privilege.

“Following the period of #MeToo Don Giovanni seems like an easy target, but actually he is not the most unpleasant character in the piece.

“I think he – as a character – is used to shoehorn other people’s agenda into their productions of the opera.”

Jonathan, who will next play Giovanni in Aberdeen, said: “I agree. I think maybe we are a bit clearer on what behaviours we are tolerating – or what we like to think we are better at tolerating now, people like Don Giovanni and how we deal with them.

“It is very easy to think ‘It’s fine, we’ve maligned that type of person’. I think it is un-PC. But I think there is a certain degree of complacency nowadays how we are able to say ‘Oh that was so bad back then’.”

Roland added: “The piece doesn’t endorse Giovanni’s behaviour, it is a condemnation of his behaviour. Every single character on stage at some point, if you will pardon my French, says how much of an a***hole Don Giovanni is, which is true. But he has been able to behave like this and his behaviour is tolerated.

“If you compare him to other characters who behave almost as badly in opera – look at the Duke in Rigoletto. He is every bit as bad, if not worse, in terms of behaviour than Giovanni because he is married but still carries on in the same way.”

But Roland points out that Don Giovanni is sung by a baritone voice: “Baritones are always baddies. But he gets a worse rep than if he was a tenor. Tenors are given leeway to behave in a far more reprehensible manner, but without being classed as being bad boys.

"They are rogues and charmers without being sociopaths and rapists!

"And I think what gets caught up in it, is that people fall into the shorthand of attaching labels that are attached to certain voice types.”

Roland: I just wanted to say something about your comment about him being dragged off to hell and being terrified. He is terrified because he says all the way through ‘Everything I do, no-one is ever going to accuse me of being a coward’.

"When he finally is dragged to hell – and he doesn’t believe it is going to happen – it is only really at the end that he admits that he feels any fear or terror.

"But until then it is as if his entire life is a challenge from him to whatever force there is.

"It's only at the very end that he acknowledges that he feels fear.

"It is literally only in the last 10 or 15, or so, bars of music before he finally gets dragged off, that he is scared.

"And I think that is one of the things that makes him interesting as a character.

"Everything he does is a provocation and a challenge to the accepted norms of society – and he doesn’t care.

"It makes him such an attractive personality.

"Also, the thing that drags him to hell is not so much the philandering but the murder of Commendatore – otherwise he would have been dragged to hell 10 years earlier!"

But the opera is about many other things that make it something special for the two baritones.

Jonathan: "From an artistic point of view, the music is incredible, quite apart from what the story and the subject matter of it is.

"It is some of Mozart’s most incredible music.

"The final scene is one of the greatest scenes of all opera – musically and dramatically.

"But then you also have gems in Don Giovanni [the opera].

"One example – and this is such a unique thing that happens in opera – at one stage Don Giovanni says ‘Now let’s sing!’

"Then he sings this wonderful serenade out of nowhere which is such an oasis and such a unique moment in all of opera also to have the mandolin playing he does as he performs the serenade.

"It is such a distilled and direct version of the character and you also see a gentler side to him, whether it is contrived or not.

"But you see so many facets of his character.

"I suppose the greatest joy we get as performers is to perform complex characters and the Don is one of the most complex ones.

"It is the greatest joy in the exercise of exploring and finding all those sides in the character and that is what makes it so exciting, this wonderful combination of music and the theatrical and what the opera means in the operatic canons.

"Don Giovanni is one of those rare moments when all those things come together in opera.

"That is why it is such a big thing to perform this role, I think.

Roland and Jonathan recall what it felt like to get their first chance to play Don Giovanni – is it a complete landmark role in their careers ?

Roland: "I think it is. Certainly for a baritone, you have your five roles that you always want to sing, every baritone wants to play.

"And I think any baritone who says ‘Oh no, I’m not interested in playing Don Giovanni!' would be lying!

"It is such a famous piece, but it is also a wonderful role – and a title role and we are all insufferable egotists and we all want to play it!

"Again, as baritones, we don’t get as many opportunities as other voice types.

"There are far more leading tenor roles. Baritones and mezzo sopranos get much more of the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

Yet there is a surprise perhaps about the difficulty of singing such an ironic part.

Roland: "It's interesting that of all the roles in opera, vocally it is very possibly the least demanding.

"I’m choosing my words very carefully. It is not easy, but the vocal heavy lifting is done by the women in particular."

Jonathan: "It is a very different challenge to sing the Don from singing other baritone roles."

Roland: "But there are also no 'easy pages' because it is an intense role dramatically.

"Whenever you are on stage you can’t ever take a backward step, you have to be entirely front and centre and present, even in the scenes where he is hiding.

"You have to maintain this presence where in other operas you can always have these little moments – I don’t want to use the word ‘rest’ but that is the best shorthand I can find. You don’t have to constantly be ‘vibrating’.

"But here you have to maintain it, it is very intense, though not necessarily vocally intense."

As an audience member, you can find yourself wondering how exactly a singer finds their way into the character and the vocal role, for a first time, and maybe after a long gap. What are the 'go to' sources to remind yourself what the role of Don Giovanni is all about or to maybe give you a different perspective?

Jonathan: "There is a sort of toolbox that we have as singers – firstly, a teacher, ideally someone who has sung the role.

"But I think the first thing we always go to is the score.

"And with this opera, Mozart was working with the librettist Da Ponte and the three operas that Mozart did with this librettist are hugely important seminal works in terms of theatre and opera and text.

"Pretty much all the answers, I like to think, all the character and the imagination, are all contained in the score and in the canon of those operas.

"How you work out something is usually – and I know this sounds simple – but it is all sort of in there, in those sources!

"But what is interesting in terms of clues we can get them by looking into the past of Italian theatre – things like the commedia del’arte.

"It can give you a real clue about how you play an 'aside' and what meaning a word is having and a reaction to it.

"So it is almost like revisiting in a broader way what opera means and what Italian theatre means.

But we are also very lucky that we are working with someone like our director Sir Thomas Allen.

"Tom has sung the role hundreds of times and in a way he has done our research for us – Or at least he can certainly hold our hands, so to speak!

"I think to answer your questions, those things may sound rather obvious.

"I did a music degree, so there are certain ways that I may look at music on the page – ‘Oh that looks interesting’ or ‘Oh, that reminds me of …’ or ‘Oh isn’t it cool the way Mozart constructed that!’, so there are clues that way.

"But as they say it takes a village to raise … an opera!

Roland: "It’s my feeling that it is all in the score. One of the things that drives me round the bend in rehearsals is when a production director says ‘Of course in the original Bonmarchais or Shakespeare or Moliere, or whatever, he does this'. And the response is always ‘Great! but he doesn’t do it in this version’.

"So what I find if I am doing a role for the first time or coming back to it 20 years later, is, you go back to what is on the page. Here is the text, what does the text mean, has it been set in a certain way, or ‘Why are there gaps between that phrase and that phrase or ‘What does that gap mean?’.

"It is it just purely musical structure and the rules of the way that people were writing music then.

"The composition rules of the time when Mozart was writing are different to when Puccini, for example, was writing.

"So you have to look at musical structure and understand what is pure form and what is dramatic intention and I think, as Jonathan is saying, if you are working with someone like Tom Allen who has sung it so many times, you can ask him to sing one phrase and he will do it 50 different ways because he has been asked to do it 50 different ways and he has developed 50 different ways of delivering it each time. That is what we do, that is our job."

"We as professional performers have to go away and work on the opera weeks, months before rehearsals, and have to know that any phrase we could deliver on stage we could deliver five or 10 different ways – depending on how the conductor wants us to sing it."

Scottish Opera’s Don Giovanni is at Eden Court now until Saturday, May 28.