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16 hours ago
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Glyndebourne’s new productions this summer have followed a theme: first Tosca, about a fictional opera singer; then L’Orfeo, about the mythical musician. Now comes Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos – an opera about an opera. It starts with the shenanigans backstage as two troupes – one high art, one low – prepare after-dinner entertainment for their rich patron, then the performance that ensues when they are forced to combine their acts. The real subject is, of course, love – and that comes across only partially in Laurent Pelly’s production.
The first part finds Pelly at his witty best. We’re in the house of the richest man in Vienna, whose taste is immediately in question; Massimo Troncanetti’s set has a huge doorway of gilded, inlaid wood clashing with a very 20th-century statement chandelier. William Relton’s fearsome Major-Domo pops up everywhere, cowing even Michael Kraus’s classily sung Music Master; Ru Charlesworth’s chainsmoking Dancing Master slinks around dressed as a sequined, velvety advert for Silk Cut. Samantha Hankey, her mezzo-soprano mellow but gleaming, plays the Composer as an irascible would-be genius; Zerbinetta, the comic leading lady, teeters in stockings and suspenders. Buoyantly conducted by Robin Ticciati, the players of the London Philharmonic, reduced in number as per Strauss’s stipulations, revel in the characters’ grand hopes and small tragedies, and Pelly plays to the stereotypes brilliantly, hitting the comic marks without sending things up.
But this is an opera of two parts. Having been told, several times, that these dinner guests are going to find the combination of rich food and serious opera conducive to sleep, it’s disappointing to find, post-picnic, that Pelly’s own handling of the second half is less sparky and less insightful than the first. Ariadne and the rest have to clamber over a huge mound of earth that feels like an operatic in-joke, and in the twilight it’s hard to see what effect, if any, each character’s words are having on anyone else.
Alina Wunderlin is her own dazzling spotlight of brightness in Zerbinetta’s monologue, throwing out high notes and little waves to the audience with equal ease, but her potential subplot with Mikhail Timoshenko’s Harlequin doesn’t amount to much. He and his scene-stealing comedian companions remain in puppet-like character throughout, and we don’t see behind the facepaint. As the Prima Donna who sings Ariadne, Rachel Willis-Sørensen has the soaring voice but barely hints at the vulnerable woman beneath, either in her long-phrased aria or in duet with David Butt Philip’s powerfully sung Bacchus.
We at least get to see the Composer vindicated, mirroring Ariadne’s movements in the gloaming behind her – and well may he revel in “his” music, as lushly played as it is here. But have any of the characters been changed by their experience? It seems not, and that leaves this Ariadne enjoyable but ultimately unmoving.
