“If we have enough actors to give Don Giovanni, let us give it soon,” the impresario and star divo Manuel Garcia cried in 1826. “It’s the best opera in the world.” Ten years before, Garcia had been Rossini’s first Figaro in The Barber of Seville. Now, he was barnstorming in New York with his family ensemble. It was Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, re-established in the New World, who put the flea in Garcia’s ear about Don Giovanni. Alas, the Garcia gang lacked a tenor up to the part of the opera’s mellifluous Arrow Collar-man Don Ottavio. Thus, it fell to Da Ponte himself, his friends, and students who were studying Italian to pull a GoFundMe to hire such a singer, which they did, and the show went on, triumphant. Garcia père portrayed the unrepentant antihero and rake, lording it over his son Manuel as Leporello, the Don’s long-suffering manservant; Manuel’s sister Maria glittered as the peasant lass Zerlina. (Some family! Manuel went on to write Traité complet de l’art du chant, the Bible of classical bel canto technique. Maria skyrocketed to fame back in Europe under her married name Maria Malibran, before she fell off a horse at age 28 and tragically died.) Leave it to the tireless musicologist-conductor Will Crutchfield and his academy Teatro Nuovo to ferret out the textual and stylistic nuances of Don Giovanni as presented at the lost Park Theatre at 23 Park Row (designed by the French-born city engineer Marc Isambard Brunel after fleeing the Terror at home). Ricardo José Rivera and Kevin Spooner sing a master and servant who share absolutely everything, but not as equals. In signature Teatro Nuovo fashion, the performance is led from the keyboard, with Geoffrey Loff serving as maestro al cembalo e direttore (the role of conductor as we know it postdates Mozart’s time). To Teatro Nuovo’s ever-expanding fan base, the revelations regarding stage-to-pit coordination are, well, revelatory. —Matthew Gurewitsch