On track: Mozart gets Big Mac-crackhouse deal

With our own Don Giovanni visiting town next week, Universal Music has astutely released a DVD set of Mozart's three greatest operas.

Giovanni is joined by Cosi fan Tutte and Figaro, in their three controversial Peter Sellars productions of 15 years ago.

This is the man who presented Tannhauser as televangelist and brought the various operas of John Adams to theatrical life.

Believe me, the American director's vision of Mozart has nothing to do with powdered wigs and gilt-wood furniture.

Musically, close your eyes and you could be in Vienna back in the 1780s; open them and you will find Giovanni is played out in the crack parlours of Harlem, Cosi in a bourgeois seaside diner and Figaro in New York's Trump Tower.

There is no doubting the immediacy of all this if you're an operatic novice. Figaro opens with laundry flirtations while Cosi's overture underscores a scene that is so Cape Cod, you expect Patti Page to emerge from a juke box.

There are nudges (Despina doing a Shirley MacLaine), naughtiness (Giovanni stripped to his briefs), outrageous product placement (the Don's final meal is courtesy of McDonald's) and Sellars' own subtitles are often a hoot ("Short and sweet, Miss Centre of the Universe," Despina snaps to a feisty Fiordiligi).

But all is not joke and jest. By casting twin brothers Eugene and Herbert Perry as the Don and Leporello, the power games underlying Don Giovanni become more intensely Freudian. With Donna Anna and Donna Elvira played by white sopranos, Dominique Labelle and Lorraine Hunt, another edge is added.

Cosi fan Tutte, despite pinks and lime greens to shriek at, has its tensions when it seems that Don Alfonso, embittered Vietnam Vet, could go amok at any moment. In Figaro, Dove sono is particularly poignant with the Countess "trapped" against a backdrop of plate glass. As Cole Porter once put it ... "Down in the depths on the 90th floor."

On the performance side, the ultimate strength is the zest of the ensemble work but there are performances I would not be without. Sanford Sylvan, in particular, dishes out the wiliest of Figaros and most terrifying Don Alfonso, singing his lines with Mozartian perfection.

"Let's all go have a ball," is Sellars' final cheeky subtitle in Figaro. Buy this set and you'll get three.

* Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni & Cosi fan Tutte, directed by Peter Sellars (Decca, 3 DVD set, 074 3087).