Judith Malafronte

The Orchestre de Paris brought detail, color, and verve to the score under Pablo Heras-Casado’s alert baton, and the Choeur Aedes did their director, Mathieu Romano, proud, with excellent singing and engaging individual characterizations.

The self-conscious staginess of The Rake’s Progress, from Hogarth’s moralizing series of paintings and prints to W. H. Auden’s treacly libretto and Stravinsky’s glamorously tart pastiche of a score, was superbly realized in a witty production by Simon McBurney.

In Jean-François Sivadier’s overthought and overwrought production, Don Giovanni is a hero, a hedonistic purist who stays true to his principles to the end.This production brings out the humanity of Giovanni’s victims, as they bond together in sorrow and frustration, but real credit goes to the beautifully detailed and responsive music-making of conductor Jérémie Rhorer.