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The Sunday Times, 5 August 2012 |
Hugh Canning |
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Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos, Salzburger Festspiele, 29. Juli 2012 |
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Revolutionary?
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A new broom is sweeping through the elegant corridors and grand auditoriums
of the Salzburg Festival, still classical music’s most glitzy, high-carat
event. Under the aegis of the Viennese Alexander Pereira, who made the
Opernhaus in Zurich the most prolific of its kind in Europe for 20 years,
the stars are back with a vengeance: Anna Netrebko sings Mimi in La bohème,
Jonas Kaufmann makes his debut as Bacchus in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf
Naxos, and Placido Domingo is trotting out almost the last tenor role — a
low one — in his repertory, Bajazet in Tamerlano.
There is more than
a whiff of Pereira’s Zurich to his opening productions, The Magic Flute and
Ariadne auf Naxos, both of which strongly feature artists closely identified
with his era in Switzerland. Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jens-Daniel Herzog
are, respectively, conductor and director of the Mozart, while Sven-Eric
Bechtolf — the new director of Salzburg’s theatre programme — is the
creative mind behind the festival’s veritable one-off version of Strauss
and Hofmannsthal’s theatrical caprice. ....... ....... Salzburg
claimed to be giving a rare outing to the original 1912 version of Ariadne
auf Naxos, a laudable aim given that its creators were among the festival’s
founding fathers. In the event, it proved nothing of the sort. True, the
original, longer version of the opera was played, but instead of
Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Bechtolf
has devised a fascinating entertainment that incorporates drama, most of
Strauss’s delectable score, and dance. It centres on Hofmannsthal’s
discreet liaison with a grieving young widow, Ottonie von
Degenfeld-Schonburg — apparently his inspiration for the abandoned Ariadne.
It incorporates elements of Molière’s play and text from the later prologue,
with which he and Strauss salvaged their hybrid flop to produce the
masterpiece we know today. In the abstract, it might sound rarefied, but in
the theatre, it proved entrancing.
Daniel Harding is no Karl Böhm —
virtual “proprietor” of this opera here from 1954 to 1980 — but with the
Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, he didn’t really need to be. As in
The Magic Flute, the principal singers were good, but only one, Kaufmann,
looked dashing in his gold leopard-skin and panther-print suit. After a
throaty start, he sang gloriously.
Even so, this original
Ariadne is just the kind of event that festivals are for, and Salzburg’s
founders, Max Reinhardt, Strauss and Hofmannsthal, would surely have
approved.
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