|
|
|
|
|
Financial Times, 1. August 2012 |
By Laura Battle |
|
Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos, Salzburger Festspiele, 29. Juli 2012 |
|
Ariadne auf Naxos, Salzburg Festival
|
Restored Strauss, early Mozart and late Schubert provided two highly rewarding festival evenings |
|
It is 100 years since the disastrous premiere of Ariadne auf Naxos. The
third collaboration between Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, which attempted to pair an adaptation of Molière’s play Le
bourgeois gentilhomme with a new opera based on the Ariadne myth, was
considered by its first night audience to be convoluted and overly long.
The piece only found success after the play was dropped in favour of a
shorter operatic prelude, so Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s plan to restore the
original for this year’s Salzburg Festival seemed brave – and his decision
to add yet another layer to the narrative, quite reckless.
Inspiration came from the real-life drama that played out during the opera’s
gestation: the flourishing friendship between Hofmannsthal and the recently
widowed Ottonie von Degenfeld-Schonburg. Here Bechtolf imagines them into
the fictional narrative: the couple blend into the action on stage as
participants and observers, introducing the spoken comedy and then
responding to the opera as Ariadne’s journey from grief to new love prompts
Ottonie’s own awakening.
The result is sublime, if occasionally
ridiculous, and it won over this critic. Cornelius Obonya plays Molière’s
foolish Monsieur Jourdain with panache and the drama is enlivened by dance
interludes that range from tight ballet movement to rowdy slapstick.
Meanwhile, Rolf Glittenberg’s elegant set designs provide a steadying
backdrop for each stage of the
play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play.
It is
testament to Emily Magee’s performance as Ariadne that the opera’s thick
layers of artifice appear to melt away during her big moments, but she is
ultimately upstaged by Jonas Kaufmann – virile, brooding and in magnificent
voice – as Bacchus. And the first night audience went wild for
Elena Mosuc’s sparkling Zerbinetta. Daniel Harding (replacing Riccardo
Chailly) conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in an account that, from
the sparser sections of instrumentation through to the opera’s great climax,
is at once taut and exuberant.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|