San Jose

Second time at Opera San Jose in the California Theatre downtown — a house with more history than either opera staged in it. The building started life as a 1927 movie palace, went through a Fox-branded remodel in the 1950s, sat closed and dark from 1973 until a $75 million restoration brought it back in 2001. Opera San Jose only moved in in 2004, so the plasterwork and chandeliers overhead are original to the silent-and-early-sound era, not the opera company.

The company itself is younger than the building by decades: founded in 1984 by mezzo-soprano Irene Dalis, a longtime star at the Metropolitan Opera in New York before she came home to the Bay Area to build a company of her own. First visit here was Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin — Pushkin's verse novel of a bored aristocrat who rejects a young woman's love, only to want her back once she is married to someone else. This time, Mozart's Don Giovanni: the 1787 telling of the Don Juan legend, the seducer dragged down to hell by the stone statue of the man he killed. Both about as standard a piece of repertory as opera gets, but the room they played in is the real story here.