THE University of York Opera Society’s first performance off-campus at the Grand Opera House on Saturday will be a first for third-year music student Jake Muffett too.

Playing hedonistic lothario and perpetual womaniser Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera of the same name will be his debut in a title role.

“It’s been a gradual drift from my sixth-form days. I started by singing in musical theatre and then drifted into opera after that,” said Jake, who is majoring in singing but also plays clarinet in the University Symphony Orchestra.

“My first role in an opera was Strethon in Iolanthe at The King’s School, Grantham, when I was 17. It’s been a big step to playing Don Giovanni over the three years I’ve been at university, where the opera society is very careful in what operas it chooses for young singers to perform because the more romantic it is, the heavier the orchestration.”

Young voices are yet to mature, which also influences which operas the society can select. “We tend to do no operas after Mozart’s time as they’re more difficult,” says Jake, who is 20.

He played the Count in the university production of Mozart’s The Marriage Of Figaro last year, but Don Giovanni represents an upgrade to the premier league of opera roles. “It’s certainly the most amount of music I’ve had to learn – and we only received the correct librettos in December,” said Jake.

“We had a few short rehearsals before the Christmas holiday break, and rehearsals kicked in from January 6, when we started to rehearse every day.”

A principal cast of eight, an ensemble of nine and conductor Alexander Conway’s 40-piece orchestra will perform Jeremy Sams’s English translation of Don Giovanni, first used by the English National Opera in 2012.

What’s more, they will be staging it amid the velvet of York’s biggest theatre. “The Grand Opera House is a huge step for the opera society, and now that this step has been made, if the show is successful, it’s almost definite that every show will take place there,” says Jake.

Co-directors William Descrettes and Simone Ibbett Brown have set their innovative version of Mozart’s darkly comic opera of lust, lies and retribution on a council estate in dingiest east London. Into this dank corner of the capital sweep seductive smooth charmer Giovanni and his feisty female companion, Leporello (Stephanie Wake-Edwards), to spark a chain of events that will alter the lives of these city-dwellers forever.

“It’s an odd one, working out how to play Don Giovanni,” said Jake. “My first impression was that he’s seen as the romantic lead, but he’s actually a very, very bad guy, when the romantic lead is normally the hero.

“He’s not a nice man at all, and setting the production in the present-day east London makes it more gritty, but it would be too much to make him Cockney. He’s more of a middle-class character.”

Does Don Giovanni remind Jake of anyone today? “I never thought to associate him with anyone living now,” he says. “I don’t think any real person could be that nasty.”

University of York Opera Society presents Don Giovanni at Grand Opera House, York, on Saturday at 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york