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The Dallas Morning News, 23 July 2014
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Scott Cantrell |
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Opera DVDs: ‘Don Carlo,’ ‘Ariadne” from Salzburg Festival |
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For
all the hand-wringing about the death of the classical-music recording
business, an amazing amount of product continues to come out. Here, on
Blu-ray discs, are two high-profile opera productions from the Salzburg
Festival. Among the attractions, in two very different roles, is Jonas
Kaufmann, probably the hottest thing among heldentenors these days—and,
in the high-definition video, quite visibly working up sweats.
..........
I did a double-take when the Ariadne disc started
playing: was the wrong opera recording erroneously slipped into the
Blu-ray package? No, this is the original 1912 version of the Strauss
opera, not the standard-rep 1916 revision—except that it isn’t. Into
what was originally a spoken prologue, based on Molière’s Le bourgeois
gentilhomme, stage director Sven-Eric Bechtolf has inserted even more
dialogue, introducing librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his then-love
interest Ottonie von Degenfeld-Schonburg as additional dramatis
personae. Original incidental music is inserted here and there.
This makes for a lot of silly chitchat and, in this production, way too
much slapstick, before we get to any familiar music. The opera proper
gets splendid vocalism from the Bacchus of Kaufmann, here sounding his
beefier Teutonic self and looking, well, like a god. He meets his match
in Emily Magee’s incandescent Ariadne and Elena Mosuc’s brilliant
Zerbinetta, and even the nymphs and clowns are consistently fine.
Conductor Daniel Harding coordinates and shapes everything surely and
sympathetically, and again the Vienna Philharmonic is in fine fettle.
But few will want to dispense with the familiar musical prologue,
especially with all this nonsense as an alternative. The considerable
musical assets of what is here do not redeem a concept gone wild.
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