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Bloomberg, Aug 6, 2012 |
By Catherine Hickley |
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Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos, Salzburger Festspiele, 29. Juli 2012 |
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Jonas Kaufmann Sports Leopard-Print Gold Suit as Bacchus
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With ballet, fencing and buffoonery as well as the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann
in a ghastly gold leopard-print suit, Richard Strauss’s opera “Ariadne auf
Naxos” at the Salzburg Festival has something for everyone.
The
audience loved it, chortling at the farce and breaking into applause after
Elena Mosuc’s mischievously coquettish, impressively accurate rendering of
Zerbinetta’s “Grossmaechtige Prinzessin” (Great Princess). One of the
trickiest arias for coloratura soprano ever written is sung by Mosuc in a
red pompom skirt accompanied by lots of pert eyelash-fluttering.
The
production by Salzburg’s newly appointed director of drama Sven-Eric
Bechtolf bravely revives the first version of the hybrid play-opera, which
premiered in Stuttgart in 1912 and was a horrendous flop -- partly because
King Karl of Wuerttemberg insisted on a big reception between the acts that
lengthened the whole evening beyond the audience’s endurance.
“Ariadne auf Naxos” is in two halves. The first part is a play based on
Moliere’s “Le bourgeois gentilhomme.” The nouveau riche buffoon Monsieur
Jourdain is trying to impress a young widow by staging an opera at his home,
then insists that it is rolled together with Zerbinetta’s comedy troupe’s
act and ends promptly to leave time for a firework display. Diverting
Clownery
This play part, later abridged by Hugo von Hofmannsthal to a
prologue, is performed in Salzburg in full, set in the elegant drawing-room
of a stately home with leafy woods beyond tall windows. The clownery,
initially diverting, wore thin before the end of Act One.
Act Two is
the play-within-the-play -- the grief-stricken Ariadne’s love-at-first-sight
meeting with the young god Bacchus, accompanied by Zerbinetta and her gang
of clowns.
Bechtolf adds yet another layer by including Von
Hofmannsthal into the mix. While he was working on “Ariadne,” the librettist
met a young, inconsolably grieving widow with whom he corresponded the rest
of his life.
The staging opens with Hofmannsthal trying to persuade
the widow that she must love again. The two remain on stage throughout,
watching the proceedings. Instead of complicating the work, it actually adds
coherence to the whole by creating a frame for the opera’s themes of
fidelity and love.
Kaufmann, who has had to cancel
performances this summer because of a lingering infection, was back in
excellent form in Salzburg, rolling on stage in a rather ungainly clinch
with Emily Magee as Ariadne. Daniel Harding, standing in for
Riccardo Chailly, conducted the Vienna Philharmonic with a light,
transparent touch.
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